Jonathan Edwards within the Enlightenment: Controversy, Experience, & Thought [1 ed.] 9783666564888, 9783525564882

Citation preview

John T. Lowe / Daniel N. Gullotta (eds.)

Jonathan Edwards within the Enlightenment: Controversy, Experience, & Thought

New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies Edited by Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema and Adriaan C. Neele

Volume 7

John T. Lowe / Daniel N. Gullotta (eds.)

Jonathan Edwards within the Enlightenment: Controversy, Experience, & Thought

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2020, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Typesetting: 3w+p GmbH, Rimpar Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2566-7327 ISBN 978-3-666-56488-8

For Kenneth P. Minkema “Knowledge in the teacher is the universal cause of knowledge in the scholar.”

Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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John T. Lowe / Daniel N. Gullotta Introduction: Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment of America . . .

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Historiography Mark G. Spencer (Brock University) Jonathan Edwards and the Historiography of the American Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Controversies John Howard Smith (Texas A&M University-Commerce) “God Has Made Us to Differ” Jonathan Edwards, the Enlightenment, and the American Indian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Gideon Mailer (University of Minnesota Duluth) “Freedom from spiritual slavery, but from civil too” Jonathan Edwards, the Scottish Enlightenment, and American Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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John T. Lowe (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Destruction and Benevolence. The New Divinity and Origins of Abolitionism in Edwardsean Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Daniel N. Gullotta (Stanford University) “By Magick and a Familiarity with the Devil” Constructing Witchcraft in Enlightenment Colonial New England and in the Mind of Jonathan Edwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

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Society Obbie Tyler Todd (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) The Populist Puritan: Jonathan Edwards and the Rise of American Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Christian Cuthbert (Alliance Theological Seminary) “More Swiftly Propagating the Gospel” Jonathan Edwards, Col. John Stoddard, and the Invasion of Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Russell J. Allen (Liberty University) Children as “White Paper” Jonathan Edwards and Enlightenment Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Experience Emily Dolan Gierer (University of Connecticut) Hannah Edwards Wetmore and Her Joyful Death. The Deathbed Confessional During the Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Kamil Marcin Halambiec (The College of Theology and Social Sciences in Warsaw) Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightened Fear of Enthusiasm . . . . . . . . 207 Lucas Hardy (Youngstown State University) Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of Pain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Amelia Marini (Cuesta College) Seeing Happiness. Jonathan Edwards and the Art of Perception . . . . . . 239

Theology Sarah B. Boss (Károli Gáspár University) “The Wheels of a Watch” Jonathan Edwards’s Emblematic Philosophy of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Philip John Fisk (Evangelische Theologische Faculteit) Que sera, sera. The Controversial 1702 Harvard Commencement Quaestio on whether the immutability of God’s decree takes away Human freedom of the will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Contents

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Christopher Woznicki (Fuller Theological Seminary) To Hell with the Enlightenment. Jonathan Edwards and the Doctrine of Hell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Matthew Everhard (Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church) Jonathan Edwards: An Intellect Precariously Astride Two Diverging Epochs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Foreword

Jonathan Edwards had an ambivalent relationship with the age in which he lived, the early eighteenth century. He certainly valued and benefited from the “great learning” that figures such as Newton and Locke brought to the world; for Edwards, Newton was nothing less than a gift from God. He also extolled the “free inquiries, and superior sense and wisdom of this age,” which would come to be called The Enlightenment. But he saw that freedom also brings diversity of thought and lifestyle–a connection that is as pertinent today as in Edwards’ time. For Edwards, while a latitude of exploration brought much that was useful, it also brought arrogance, selfishness, superficiality, and “infidelity,” a term that for Edwards (and for Timothy Dwight after him) meant not so much unfaithfulness in marriage as betrayal and corruption of truth. He battled those forces in the forms of Arminianism, Deism, radical New-Lightism, and other “fashionable schemes.” Today, we face our own infidelities in the forms of racism, misogyny, fundamentalisms, and environmental catastrophe. Many, if not all, of the ills of the modern world have been blamed on The Enlightenment, that age of learning and inquiry, of free thought and revolution. Edwards has by some commentators been viewed as a corrective to those ills. Both of these positions operate on overly simple assumptions. The Enlightenment itself is undergoing a reappraisal as to its nature, phases, and consequences, with the realization that the movement was not as complete a break from the past as previously thought, its legacies more complicated. Scholarship on Edwards has shifted the rather romantic image of him as a lone voice crying in the wilderness to one that locates him much more securely within not only the Reformed tradition but also within the early, “Christian” phase of The Enlightenment. Not lightly did Sydney Ahlstrom dub Edwards a “Dordtian Philosophe.” This collection of essays continues the inquiry into both the nature of the Enlightenment and Edwards’ relation to it. And it does so by importing themes from other disciplines and applying them to the study of Edwards, or by further exploration of Edwardsean themes that have not received due attention. The currency and innovativeness of the topics and approaches of these essays com-

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Foreword

mend them. In addition, this volume is the work of some from among a new cohort of up-and-coming scholars. For many contributors, this is their first publication, or among their first. This “rising generation”–as Edwards called the young people of his day, implying the promise that they represent–imagined, initiated and created this collection, with a view to express, among other things, their own priorities and interests. It belongs to the “elders” among us–those “grown old in sin”–as well as to scholars and interested readers of all generations to support and engage with the products of their labor. Kenneth P. Minkema Jonathan Edwards Center Yale University

John T. Lowe / Daniel N. Gullotta

Introduction: Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment of America

In her Epilogue to the first serious modern biography of Jonathan Edwards, Ola E. Winslow wrote: “In a word, it is the greatness of one who had a determining art of initiating and directing a popular movement of far-reaching consequence, and who in addition, laid the foundations for a new system of religious thought, also of far-reaching consequence.”1 After two and a half centuries since Edwards’s death, Winslow’s statement is undoubtedly true, and perhaps, more so now than ever. The recovery of Edwards pioneered by Perry Miller, Ola Winslow, and Thomas Schafer, among others, has become what is often referred to as an “Edwards renaissance,” and has been made even more popular among lay people by John Piper, Stephen Nichols, and the like. Since the free online access of The Works of Jonathan Edwards by Yale University, dozens of books and articles, as well as numerous dissertations, each year are written to seek a facet of Edwards’s “greatness,” and his continued “far-reaching consequence.” Much of the current work on Edwards has focused mainly upon his metaphysics and theology but has overlooked areas focusing on the cultural history that surrounded him and the influence he had on later thought. After decades of study on Edwards, new avenues in scholarship are being discovered across multiple disciplines. These studies offer a fresh perspective of Edwards’s interaction with topics such as abolition, gender, populism, education, pain, and witchcraft among others. This volume seeks to introduce a few of these areas and cultivate discussion on new ways scholars should think and understand Edwards, as well as his role in American intellectual history. In doing so, this volume will contribute to Edwards studies, and more broadly, to the scholarship and understand of eighteenth-century America. So why Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment? Why is it necessary to think of him inside this context? For several years now, scholars have debated how the Enlightenment affected (or not affected) the mind of early evangelicals. Traditionally, scholars have considered that early evangelicals were adamantly op1 Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758, 297.

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posed to reason because it allegedly diminished faith. Almost as a modern “Rome versus Athens.” According to some, Edwards should be considered as the Apostle of the Enlightenment who rode the crest of the wave of the New Learning, but for others, his puritan heritage caused him to drown in the sea of oncoming European intellectualism.2 The fame of European intellectuals such as David Hume, John Locke, and Francis Hutcheson, made science and reason appear to be sufficient for understanding human experience, and thus undermining Christian orthodoxy. On the contrary, scholars such as David Bebbington suggest that, in many ways, Enlightenment ideals were well received among evangelicals. As both movements became more popular, their relationship became tighter—and even fused together.3 The point of this volume is not to argue that Edwards somehow represents the fusion of Enlightenment ideas and evangelical beliefs (although he might), but to use the Enlightenment-evangelical relationship as framework to understand Edwards’s thought and legacy. The hope is that the chapters that follow—these new directions—will add to how scholars should think about Edwards and the Enlightenment and compel others to seek new directions in the same conversation. The volume opens with Mark Spencer’s chapter on the historiography of Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment. Spencer traces the development of how scholars have traditionally viewed Edwards in the context of the Enlightenment. Scholars have typically situated Edwards in a transatlantic setting— interacting with European intellectuals and divines. But why is understanding this background important to understanding Edwards? Spencer offers a taste of several debates and ideas that surround how Edwards did or did not fit into the Enlightenment, thus giving context to reading the chapters that follow. A period of Edwards’s life that has that is garnering increasing attention has been his dealings with the Native Americans at Stockbridge. It’s commonly been recognized as a dark time in Edwards’s life—being dismissed from Northampton pastorate, and reluctant to take a post on the frontier. Early writings of Edwards’s life denote the obvious disdain he had for the natives, but something happened while he was ministering to them that changed his opinion. Instead of holding onto prejudices, Edwards became their defender. Yet Edwards was no pluralist, as Edwards also participated in violence against Native Americas, such as depriving them of traditional language and culture. In his essay, “’God Has Made Us to Differ’: Jonathan Edwards, the Enlightenment, and the American Indian,” John H. Smith investigates why Edwards had a change of heart toward his indigenous 2 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “Theology In America: A Historical Survey,” in The Shaping of American Religion, ed. James Ward Smith, A. Leland Jamison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 245. 3 David W. Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody, ed. David W. Bebbington and Mark A. Noll (Intervarsity Press, 2005), 118.

Introduction: Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment of America

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congregation. This often-overlooked story offers a new sense of how historians look at Edwards and his ministry to Native Americans. No longer viewed as an “exile,” Smith argues that Edwards’s relationship to Native Americans to be “far better than expected.” In the same realm of controversial issues is Gideon Mailer’s piece, “’Freedom from spiritual slavery, but from civil too:’ Jonathan Edwards, the Scottish Enlightenment, and American Slavery.” Edwards had condemned the slave trade but approved of slavery as an institution. Mailer suggests that Edwards’s contact with Enlightenment thought—specifically with Scottish Presbyterians like Francis Hutcheson—is responsible for his response to American slavery. These Scottish evangelical intellectuals questioned current ethical tenets, and through these interactions, Edwards’s formed his own concepts of slavery. Recently the subject of Edwards’ slaveholding has driven scholars to examine his theology in the light of the African slave trade. But with the growing tensions over slavery with the early Republic as a backdrop, John T. Lowe investigates how some of Edwards most passionate students and strongest devotees embraced antislavery theology. Lowe examines how figures from within the New Divinity, such as Jonathan Edwards Jr. and Samuel Hopkins, used Edwards’ own theological principals to help attack the logic of slavery and expose the hypocrisy of Christian slaveholders, despite the fact that their greatest theological influence was himself a slaver. An ongoing issue for scholars of the Enlightenment is why and how the witch trials ended during the eighteenth century. Yet recent scholarship has challenged the so-called successes of the Enlightenment, demonstrating that a decline in witch trials did not mean the weakening of belief in their existence nor power. Daniel N. Gullotta uses Jonathan Edwards as a model for exploring the limits and tensions within the American Enlightenment’s reaction to the belief in the existence of witches and in their power. While Jonathan Edwards never partook in a witch hunt, witches are nonetheless a notable feature of his writing. Gullotta stresses that Edwards was a part of a changing American religious landscape that was mutating in its views on witches within the world of the Enlightenment. In yet another peculiar avenue of Edwards scholarship is Obbie Tyler Todd with “The Populist Puritan: Jonathan Edwards and the Rise of American Populism.” Edwards was no doubt part of what we would consider an elite social class, so it is unusual to think of him appealing to the popular ethos of his age. Todd suggests that Enlightenment principles such as individualism influenced Edwards in three distinct ways toward populism: challenging age-old barriers between learned clergy and ordinary people; empowering the laity by legitimizing their deepest spiritual impulses; and reducing limitations on religious outsiders. Using these three criteria, Todd argues that Edwards changed the previous Puritan worldview that pitted him against the elites of his own social class and

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opened spiritual entrepreneurship to the commoner, which in turn stripped ecclesiastical authority. Often, scholars have not typically assumed Jonathan Edwards in a war-like context. However, Edwards was part of the British Empire and lived in a world inhabited by violence, namely, King William’s War (1689–97), and Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). Christian Cuthbert examines Edwards’s war time sermons in “’More Swiftly Propagating the Gospel’: Jonathan Edwards, Col. John Stoddard, and the Invasion of Canada.” In examining Edwards’s perspective on war, Cuthbert suggests that Edwards perspective of war was influenced by his uncle and revered community member, Col. John Stoddard. Cuthbert concludes that Edwards was by no means a pacifist. Moreover, Edwards thought that war was a permissible means to fulfill theological ends. Within the British and American Enlargements, John Locke influenced subjects as varied as economics, politics, philosophy, metaphysics, even child rearing. As a deeper reader of Lockean content, Edwards consumed Locke’s thinking of children. Russell J. Allen explores how Edwards reconciled Locke’s views on children with that of the Bible as well as the wider context of Puritan theology. Allen argues that this had mixed results, as the two were often difficult to square because of Puritanism’s convictions concerning original sin and the imago dei as well as Locke’s theory that children were born as if they were blank slates. Death came easy in the eighteenth century, along with close encounters with the divine on deathbeds, and while numerous testimonials from near death experiences, funeral sermons, and other didactic writings circulated with popularity, Emily Dolan Gierer focuses on the previously unpublished deathbed confession of Hannah Edwards Wetmore. Dolan Gierer argues that unlike most contemporary deathbed confessionals, that of Wetmore, Edwards’s sister, was not mediated by male clergy and presents exciting new evidence for women’s religious experience within the American Enlightenment. In the next essay, “Jonathan Edwards on the Light Side of Pain,” Lucas Hardy examines Edwards’s theory of pain. Like many within the Enlightenment, Edwards was fascinated by the human body and its capabilities for feeling, but unlike his predecessors, William Perkins, the Mathers, and even John Calvin, who thought pain was an opportunity to weed out sin and become pious, Edwards thought pain, as Hardy puts it, “opened the inclination of the will that revealed persons to be in the lowest condition of human existence: the natural man.” Hardy argues that by describing the character of the “spiritual” person, one’s orientation changes toward the natural body. By dismissing Lockean concepts, Edwards’s theory of pain sets it outside of consciousness and identity. Hardy uses the cases of Abigail Hutchinson and David Brainerd to show how Edwards did not think that pain shaped or determined a Christian’s identity.

Introduction: Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment of America

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Jonathan Edwards was a defender of gracious affections. But his contentions concerned the approach to these—namely, identifying their truthful manifestations. Kamil Halambiec argues in his “Enlightened Fear of Enthusiasm and Jonathan Edwards” that Edwards demonstrated a possibility of a relationship between religious enthusiasm and enlightened philosophy. While Enlightenment thinkers typically rejected enthusiastic manifestations, Edwards advocated for religion that moved the heart—and not just the intellect. In his Religious Affections, Edwards identified experience with both the heart and mind as the locale for one’s true religion. Without this, it was appropriate for one to assume a fear of enthusiasm. However, Edwards did not abandon logic or rationale. His Religious Affections, as Halambiec contends reveals how “carefully reasoned and rigorously logical” Edwards was in his approach to the fear of enthusiasm. Words that are commonly associated with the name Jonathan Edwards usually include: hell, sin, will, justification, sovereignty, and the like. Rarely, if ever, does one associate happiness with Edwards. Challenging this perception, Amelia Marini suggests in her chapter, “Seeing Happiness: Jonathan Edwards and the Art of Perception,” that happiness was an exalted role in Edwards’s thinking. Happiness appears over 5,000 times in his collected works, so it’s surprising that this role in Edwards’s writing has gone unnoticed. Marini argues that if we are to “understand Edwards’s philosophical and religious mind, we must be attuned to the temperamental melody of his thought,” and to understand his thought. Understanding how he employs happiness will give readers a more well-rounded analysis of his thought. A highly discussed subject has been Edwards’s philosophy of history, but an overlooked facet of this topic has been his concept of time. In, “The Wheels of a Watch”: Jonathan Edwards’s Emblematic Philosophy of Time,” Sarah Boss discusses Edwards’s use of Enlightenment metaphors of machinery, wheels, and clocks to express a philosophy of time that was “closely akin to Renaissance emblems of time.” Instead of strictly using Enlightenment imagery, or Renaissance typology, Boss argues that Edwards used both to reimagine a concept of divine presence as it relates to God, humans, and history. Over the past two decades, one of the hotter topics—and perhaps unavoidable —concerning Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freewill. In “The Controversial 1702 Harvard Commencement Quaestio on whether the Immutability of God’s Decree takes away Human Freedom of the Will,” Philip Fisk examines how Edwards was influenced by the Enlightenment principles of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles. Fisk brings in the background of Chaucer, and Edwards’s predecessors—the George Keith and Samuel Willard debate—and concludes that Edwards’s “interpretation and application of these principles led him to

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some ‘dark’ conclusions about God’s relation to the world,” and therefore scholars should perhaps rethink Edwards’s Enlightenment legacy. As one might assume, the effects of the Enlightenment extended even to the doctrines of hell—or in Edwards’s case, a lack thereof. Popular Enlightenment thinkers began to change their conceptions of justice, reason, and revelation, so too did their notions of hell. However, Edwards did not find himself among these revisionists. In this next chapter, “To Hell with the Enlightenment: Jonathan Edwards and the Doctrine of Hell,” Chris Woznicki examines the theological trends of Edwards’s day and asks why he did not adopt them for his own. Woznicki suggests that the primary reason for Edwards holding fast to a traditional doctrine of hell was his teleological commitments of God’s glorification. Scholars have often seen Edwards as kind of ‘last Puritan,’ embodying the outdated Calvinistic principals and beliefs that would be pushed aside by the American Revolution. In this chapter, “Jonathan Edwards: An Intellect Precariously Astride Two Diverging Epochs,” Matthew Everhard argues that this rendering of Edwards’s context is not only overly simplistic but also does not capture the ways in which the Enlightenment shaped much of his life. Everhard demonstrates that Edwards was torn between two eras within American history, embracing the religion of his ancestors as well as the rationalism many thought that was undermining it. Edwards may have been among the last of the Puritans, but Everhard claims he was among the first Americans to embrace the Enlightenment. This offering is meant for all readers of Edwards and those who seek to understand his “greatness.” The chapters are by no means an exhaustive collection of ways we should be thinking about Edwards, but we hope it stimulates other, newer ways to contemplate his thought and its influence. In doing so, we can achieve a clearer image of who Edwards was and how he thought within his Enlightenment world.

Historiography

Mark G. Spencer (Brock University)*

Jonathan Edwards and the Historiography of the American Enlightenment

2.1

Introduction: Henry F. May and the problem of fitting Edwards into the Enlightenment

“Like most profound thinkers, he cannot be fitted into any category.”1 That is how Henry F. May (1915–2012) side-stepped categorizing Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). He did so in his now-classic book, The Enlightenment in America (1976), an account published more than forty years ago, in part to commemorate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence.2 It was not a move of mere convenience; there is a good deal of wisdom underlying May’s statement. But the futility of the enterprise has not stopped scholars—both before and since May, from attempting to categorize Edwards, within and without the Enlightenment. And, although Edwards did not fit comfortably into May’s overlapping categories of Enlightenment, he did find a place there, of sorts. After all, much about Edwards’s life and writings related to the American Enlightenment, as May understood it. Edwards, born near the opening of the eighteenth century, was one of colonial America’s most formidable thinkers. Fortunate family circumstances helped foster his innate abilities.3 His father, the Reverend Timothy Edwards (1669– * The author thanks the book’s co-editors for inviting his contribution to their volume. He is grateful to Roger L. Emerson and Roger J. Fechner for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of his chapter. 1 Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 49. 2 For a recent assessment of May and his contribution to American Enlightenment historiography, see John M. Dixon, “Henry F. May and the Revival of the American Enlightenment: Problems and Possibilities for Intellectual and Social History,” The William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, vol. 71, no. 2 (April 2014): 55–280. 3 For the details of Edwards’s life, see George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), winner of the Bancroft Prize and the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies prize for biography. But older works remain valuable, including Ola Elizabeth Winslow’s (1885–1977), Pulitzer-Prize winning Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1940; reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1961) which

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1758), had graduated from Harvard and was a learned Congregationalist minister. His mother, Esther Stoddard Edwards (1672–1771), was the bright daughter of another Calvinist minister and notable preacher, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729), of Northampton, Massachusetts Bay Colony. Stoddard’s influence on his grandson was significant. It is difficult to measure in precise ways, but it surely included encouraging in his grandson pursuits of the mind in a life devoted to preaching and theology. Historians have increasingly come to appreciate that reading formed a large part of the relatively book-rich environment in which the New England boy was raised. Again, though, determining the specific impact of those books continues to prove difficult.4 The most recent work has documented in even greater detail the place of books in Edwards’s life.5 Collectively, these works show that the scope of Edwards’s reading expanded considerably when he attended Yale College from 1716 to 1720 and that books, and print culture more generally, remained an ongoing concern for him throughout his life. In their efforts to understand Edwards’s thought, scholars have attributed various sources as primary ones influencing Edwards’s intellectual development. They often range back to his college reading which included Enlightenment authors. For Edwards’s earliest biographer, his friend and the New Divinity man Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803), it was John Locke (1632–1704) who stood out. Edwards was born the year before Locke’s death and the Englishman’s works, especially his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), gained popularity—even in rural Massachusetts—as Edwards came of age.6 Hopkins wrote: In his second year at college, and the thirteenth of his age, he read Locke on the human understanding, with great delight and profit. . . Taking that book into his hand, upon some occasion, not long before his death, he said to some of his select friends, who were provides a balanced study of Edwards’s life as a whole. Also useful is the succinct sketch of Edwards’s life by Harry Norman Gardiner and Richard Webster in the eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, 32 vols (New York, 1910–11), vol. 9, 3–6. 4 See William Sparks Morris, The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1991), based on his Ph.D dissertation, “The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction” (University of Chicago, 1955). See also Morris, “The Genius of Jonathan Edwards,” in Jerald C. Brauer, ed., Reinterpretation in American Church History (Chicago, 1968), 29–65. As well, see Thomas H. Johnson’s earlier work, “Jonathan Edwards’ Background of Reading,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 28 (1931), 193–222. 5 For a recent and detailed account of the books in Edwards’s life, see Peter J. Thuesen, ed. Catalogues of Books, vol. 26 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). For Edwards’s own dealings with book printers, publishers, and editors, see Jonathan M. Yeager, Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 6 See Mark G. Spencer, “Introduction: John Locke and his World,” in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding with the Second Treatise on Government (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World, 2014), vii–xxvii.

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then with him, that he was beyond expression entertain’d and pleas’d with it, when he read it in his youth at college; that he was much engaged, and had more satisfaction and pleasure in studying it, than the most greedy miser in gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some new discovered treasure.7

As we shall see, scholars have pursued this thesis about Locke’s impact on Edwards in various directions. Some, by expanding on it; others, by rejecting it outright. Others still have emphasized Edwards’s absorbing ideas from the writings of other early British Enlightenment figures, such as the English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.8 For scholars such as Norman Fiering, it was a wider seventeenth-century European context to which Edwards was introduced at Yale that best explains Edwards’s intellectual world. Included in that reading for Fiering were works by Dutch and German philosophers, such as Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716), and French thinkers, such as Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) and Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715).9 Leaving aside the question of who influenced Edwards most, the nominees mentioned above are an eclectic group and connect Edwards to various branches of early Enlightenment thought. And other books vied for his attention. Many of them had been added to Yale’s library in 1714 by Jeremiah Dummer (1681–1739), a Boston-born Harvard graduate and colonial agent, who generously donated some 800 volumes. Among them, along with Locke, Newton (with whom Dummer corresponded), Hutcheson, Arnauld, and Malebranche, were works by Jean Bodin (1530–1596), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), Algernon Sydney (1623–1683), Robert Boyle (1627– 1691), John Tillotson (1630–1694), Robert Hooke (1635–1703), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736), and Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), to name a handful. In this assortment of French 7 Samuel Hopkins, Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1765), 11–12. 8 See, for instance, James H. Tufts, “Edwards and Newton,” Philosophical Review, vol. 49 (1940), 609–622; Alfred O. Aldridge, “Edwards and Hutcheson,” Harvard Theological Review, vol. 44 (1951), 35–53; and Gideon Mailer, John Witherspoon’s American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 171–174. 9 See, Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), Fiering, Moral Philosophy at SeventeenthCentury Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press), and Fiering, “The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards’s Metaphysics,” in Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout, eds, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 73–101. Fiering’s work figures later in this essay as well.

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thinkers and Cartesian philosophers, British scientists, and Cambridge Platonists were the works on which was built the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. But how did Edwards fit in with this intellectual heritage? What did he make of what he read? And what does this background tell us about Edwards’s place in the Enlightenment? Those and similar questions have been taken up by many Enlightenment scholars over the years, including May. As May pointed out, simply because Edwards read Enlightenment authors did not make him into one of the enlightened. May wrote: Despite his [Edwards’s] eager appropriation of Locke and Newton and Hutcheson for his own purposes, he was not a man of the moderate, rational English Enlightenment of his day. Indeed he was the most powerful enemy of that way of thought. To Locke or Clarke, Tillotson or Tindal, greatly though they differed, the universe was orderly, intelligible, and moral; man was learning to understand it and could order his life accordingly.

Edwards’s universe, on the other hand, “was orderly and intelligible only on its surface. The operations of the mind, the relation of subject and object, the existence of personal identity were all, like the rotations of the planets, dependent on the exertion, from minute to minute, of God’s inscrutable will.”10 That is why Edwards did not fit easily into May’s Enlightenment.11

2.2

Vernon L. Parrington’s Edwardsean tragedy

Indeed, for a generation of scholars before May, Edwards’s belief in the absolute sovereignty of God, what some saw as a severe religious outlook—he was, after all the preacher of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)—is what seemingly cut him off from the more “liberal” enlightened world that was taking shape. Perhaps with none was that assessment clearer than with Vernon L. Parrington (1871–1929). Edwards provided one of the main currents in Parrington’s influential three-volume Main Currents in American Thought (1927–1930). But, Edwards’s current ran the wrong way; it was an undercurrent.12 As Parrington 10 May, 49. May had grappled with Edwards in an early publication, too. There, he argued: “Even Edwards, I think, made eager use of the weapons of the Enlightenment in a direction contrary to its general direction as I have loosely defined it”; see Henry F. May, “The Problem of the American Enlightenment,” New Literary History, vol. 1, no. 2 (1970), 201–214, passage quoted at 207. 11 May later built upon these ideas in “Jonathan Edwards and America,” in Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout, eds. Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 19–33. 12 Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927–1930).

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explained in his “Introduction” to volume 1, The Colonial Mind, 1620–1800, Edwards was to be contrasted with the “protagonists of liberalism.”13 Later chapters juxtaposed Edwards, the “colonial Calvinist,” and Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), the “colonial democrat.”14 Edwards was not a participant in Parrington’s Enlightenment; he stubbornly stood in its way. “Before an adequate democratic philosophy could arise in this world of pragmatic individualism,” wrote Parrington in his opening line for a chapter entitled “The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards,” Edwards’s “traditional system of New England theology must be put away, and a new conception of man and of his duty and destiny in the world must take its place. . . An intellectual Aufklärung was a necessary preliminary to the creation of a fruitful social philosophy.”15 For Parrington, Edwards’s New England was cut off from the main currents of the European Enlightenment. It “stewed in its petty provincialism, untouched by the brisk debates that stirred the old world.”16 Edwards was cast as “the last and greatest” in a “royal line of Puritan mystics.” His career was to be understood as “a lifelong devotion to the God-idea,” wrote Parrington. “To one cardinal principle Edwards was faithful—the conception of the majesty and sufficiency of God; and this polar idea provides the clue to both his philosophical and theological systems.”17 Seen in that way, Edwards’s intellectual life was a “tragedy”; “the theologian triumphed over the philosopher, circumscribing his powers to ignoble ends.”18 Edwards was anti-Enlightenment: “His celebrated work On the Freedom of the Will, written in 1754, not only was his most important contribution to theology, but it was the last great defence of the conservatism that was stifling the intellectual life of New England.”19 Edwards’s only contribution to the advance of liberalism was made unwittingly. That was when he helped bring about the Great Awakening and wrote about it in works such as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work, of God (1737), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1742), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). “Day after day,” wrote Parrington, Edwards “probed and analyzed and compared, until as a result of his close studies in vivisection, he became a specialist in the theory of conversion, commanding the eager attention of a generation that had come to look upon this as the central fact of Christian experience.”20 And, within the success of the 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, v. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, v. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 148. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 148. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 152. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 158. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 157. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 160.

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revival Edwards sparked were the seeds of the destruction of America’s traditional churches. “By a curious irony of fate, Jonathan Edwards, reactionary Calvinist and philosophical recluse, became the intellectual leader of the revolutionaries.”21 Parrington concluded, in a rhetorical flourish: The greatest mind of New England had become an anachronism in a world that bred Benjamin Franklin. . . The intellectual powers were his, but the inspiration was lacking; like Cotton Mather before him, he was the unconscious victim of a decadent ideal and a petty environment. Cut off from fruitful intercourse with other thinkers, drawn away from the stimulating field of philosophy into the arid realm of theology, it was his fate to devote his noble gifts to the thankless task of re-imprisoning the mind of New England within a system from which his nature and his powers summoned him to unshackle it. He was called to be a transcendental emancipator, but he remained a Calvinist.22

Parrington had no trouble categorizing Jonathan Edwards, and it was not among the enlightened. That way of seeing things held sway for a long time over many, including most historians of early America of the next generation. But one, Perry Miller (1905–1963), provided an alternative view that would have its own lasing impact.

2.3

Perry Miller’s modern Edwards and its aftermath

In several book-length publications, especially in his biography Jonathan Edwards (1949), Miller argued that while Edwards may not have belonged squarely in the Enlightenment, he knew and employed its language.23 Miller demonstrated that point by comparing Edwards with the Reverend Charles Chauncy (1705– 1787). Chauncy, a vocal opponent of the emotionalism of the Great Awakening and, later, a strong supporter of the American Revolution, Miller took to be Edwards’s nemesis. He found their contemporary debate to be one telling of Edwards’s modernity. It was also an ironic story, of sorts: The irony is that the theological liberal [Chauncy], who in every trait stands for the rational Enlightenment, spoke in the language of outmoded science, and the defender of Calvinism [Edwards] put his case upon a modern, dynamic, analytical psychology in which the human organism was viewed, not as a system of gears, but as a living unit.24

21 Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 161. 22 Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 161–163. 23 See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: MacMillan, 1939), Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949), and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953). 24 Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 178. Others later, as we shall see, did not see such a contrast between Edwards and Chauncy.

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Moreover, Miller differentiated his “great modern” Edwards from other religionists with whom he was often grouped: It would be inaccurate to say that Edwards dissented from the Enlightenment simply by asserting, against the confidence that whatever is, is right, the sinfulness of man. Such a description would characterize Whitefield and Tennent, or what is called in general Pietism. But the Enlightenment was, and remains, a challenge to Christian culture that cannot be summarily disposed of, nor can its successes in physics and analysis be ignored, as the “romantics” attempted . . . With all his defects and the limitations of his techniques, Edwards is a great modern in his refusal to confess that the eternal world is an utter mystery, by his summoning Christians to realize that “to understand and know which, it chiefly was, that they had understanding given them.”

Miller concluded that Edwards, the “apologist for emotion,” was “no fundamentalist or anti-intellectual, and he could criticize the Enlightenment because he was enlightened.”25 Miller’s account of Edwards and the Enlightenment has had a lasting impact on subsequent historiography—not least of all because it is a compelling story convincingly told. Those who have built upon it over the year have included David Levin, Edward H. Davidson (1918–2001), Wallace E. Anderson, Claude A. Smith, Francis T. Butts, and Stephen R. Yarbrough, among several of Edwards’s later biographers and other scholars of American intellectual history.26 In his American Minds: A History of Ideas, a book that acknowledged obligations to Perry Miller, among others, Stow Persons (1913–2006) included Edwards in the section on “The Mind of the American Enlightenment: 1740–1820,” writing that 25 Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 237–238. It is worth noting that more recent work on William Tennent shows it is worth while to approach him from within the context of the Enlightenment as well. See Nina Reid-Maroney, Philadelphia’s Enlightenment, 1740–1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). 26 See David Levin, ed. The Puritan in the Enlightenment: Franklin and Edwards (Rand McNally & Company, 1963), where Miller’s account (which had compared Edwards and Franklin) is described as “the most incisive and original study of Edwards’ thought” (p. 60); Edward H. Davidson, “From Locke to Edwards,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 24 (1963), 355–372, and Jonathan Edwards: The Narrative of a Puritan Mind (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1966); Wallace E. Anderson, “Immaterialism in Jonathan Edwards’ Early Philosophical Notes,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 25 (1964), 181–200; Claude A. Smith, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘the Way of Ideas,’” Harvard Theological Review, vol. 59 (1966), 153–174; Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 1 (1969), 51–61; Francis T. Butts, “Norman Fiering and the Revision of Perry Miller,” Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 1986), 1–26; Stephen R. Yarbrough, “Jonathan Edwards on Rhetorical Authority,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 47, (1986), 395–408. Both Yarbrough’s essay and Anderson’s, cited above, were later reprinted in a collection of essays on The American Enlightenment (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1993), edited by Frank Shuffelton (1940–2010). Even more recently, see Paul Helm, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and The Religious Affections,” Jonathan Edwards Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2016).

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“Edwards revealed himself in many respects a child of the Enlightenment.”27 Some, such as Alan Heimert (1929–1999), might be thought to have amplified Miller’s account by extending it through to the American Revolution. For Heimert, there was a continuity to be drawn between Edwards’s revivalism and the political thought of the American Revolutionaries.28 Nathan O. Hatch, Harry S. Stout, Thomas S. Kidd and others have sketched more of that scene. But not all have been convinced by Heimert. For most scholars, as we shall see, Edwards was not a figure who might be associated with the American Revolution.29 Even after Miller, though, many also continued to see Edwards’s relation to the Enlightenment in ways similar to Parrington. Adrienne Koch (1913–1971) is an example of one who did. For Koch, like Parrington, Calvinist Edwards was one to be contrasted with enlightened Franklin. “Both of these men from youth on had studied and resolved to make use of the ‘new science’ and were influenced especially by the Newtonian scheme,” she wrote. But, Koch explained, Edwards was not enlightened: “Yet what they made of Newton accentuated the differences between them, rather than uniting them in a common outlook. For Edwards, Isaac Newton and John Locke provided an armory of new ideas with which to fortify the languishing doctrine of predestination and original sin. He seized on the sensationalistic empiricism of Locke to add a new supernatural sense in order to establish the transcendental truths of revelation and Scripture.”30 Others, such as Norman Fiering, whose work we have briefly considered above, did not extend or ignore Miller’s assessment of Edwards, but challenged it head on. As Oliver D. Crisp put it in his “Foreword” to a new edition of Fiering’s Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context, Fiering’s Edwards was not simply “a Lockean philosopher” as Miller supposed, but “a thinker whose 27 Stow Persons, American Minds: A History of Ideas (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958), 107. 28 Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). See also, Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, eds, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). 29 Edmund S. Morgan’s scathing review of Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind ended with this line: “The world he [Heimert] offers us has been constructed by reading beyond the lines of what men said; and what he finds beyond the lines is so far beyond, so wrenched from the context, and so at odds with empirical evidence, that his world, to this reviewer at least, partakes more of fantasy than of history”; see The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 3 (July 1967), 454–459, passage quoted at p. 459. 30 Adrienne Koch, “Pragmatic Wisdom and the American Enlightenment,” The William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, vol. 18, no. 3 (1961), 313–329, passage quoted at 314–315. Koch explained further in a note, “That a revived Calvinism should proceed out of Edwards’s early preoccupation with Berkeleyan idealism and Lockean sensationalist empiricism is one of the surprises which impassioned religious piety sometimes works on decorous (more or less) free thought” (n. 3, p. 315). But, for Locke, one knows only what the senses reveal—much is left in doubt.

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moral theology was on the cusp of the early Enlightenment,” “a thinker who grasped the importance of the ‘new learning’ and bent all the ideas he could get his hand on, to the task of making sense of his ‘God-intoxicated’ thinking.”31 Much more clearly than with Miller, for Fiering the central problem was not just how to categorize Edwards but how doing so might help us to better understand Edwards and his world. Another who challenged Miller’s Edwards—but for very different reasons— was the historian Peter Gay (1923–2015). Edwards did not count among Gay’s family of philosophes. One can read both volumes of Gay’s game-changing The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, first published in 1966, and miss Edwards entirely. The reason for that becomes clear if one considers another of Gay’s books published that year—his less-well-known A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America.32 “In the midst of the greatest revolution in the European mind since Christianity had overwhelmed paganism,” Gay wrote in that book, “Edwards serenely reaffirmed the faith of his fathers.”33 As was the case for Parrington, so with Gay, Edwards was not one to be counted among the enlightened; he was to be contrasted with them. Following a summary of the historical writings of Voltaire (1694–1778), David Hume (1711–1776), William Robertson (1721–1793), and Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), Gay wrote: To turn from these books to Edwards’ History of the Work of Redemption is to leave the familiar terrain of the modern world with its recognizable features and legible signposts for a fantastic landscape, alive with mysterious echoes from a distant past, and intelligible only—if it can be made intelligible at all—with the aid of outmoded, almost primitive maps. The philosophes’ histories made secular propaganda by providing information about a real past; Edwards’ history made religious propaganda by arousing memories of a religious myth. To grasp the temper of Voltaire’s or Hume’s histories, one must read the new philosophy and collections of state papers; to grasp the temper of Edwards’ history, one must read the Church Fathers and the Scriptures. However magnificent in conception, however bold in execution, Edwards’ History of the Work of Redemption is a thoroughly traditional book and the tradition is the tradition of Augustine.34 31 Oliver Crisp, “Foreword,” to Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2006). 32 Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966). 33 Gay, A Loss of Mastery, 91. 34 Gay, A Loss of Mastery, 93–94. Since, scholars have challenged Gay’s interpretation. As John E. Smith pointed out, Gay appears to misread Edwards’s intentions in A History of the Work of Redemption, sermons first preached in 1739. “Edwards did not regard his account as replacing secular histories or as a substitute for them in any sense; his work represents, as he said, a ‘new method in divinity’ which is cast in the form of historical narrative instead of theological and philosophical discussion of the sort to be found in his great treatises. Peter Gay, in his account of Puritan historians in colonial America, misses this point and supposes

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Gay’s Edwards “read deeply and voraciously” and he employed the language of the Enlightenment (“history, observation, and experience”), but he lived in “physical isolation”; the “outside world existed mainly to supply him with echoes.”35 Gay’s assessment was much closer to Parrington than Miller: “Far from being the first modern American . . . [Edwards] was the last medieval American —at least among the intellectuals.”36

2.4

Defining Edwards in a shifting Enlightenment historiography

Looking back at the historiography of Parrington, Miller, and Gay from the vantage point of 1969, John Opie (1934–2018) tried to make sense of their widely differing assessments in Jonathan Edwards and The Enlightenment. He wrote that, “today Jonathan Edwards is largely remembered as a violent and sarcastic preacher of the immediacy of hell-fire in the turbulent Great Awakening in the 1740’s.”37 “Until recently,” argued Opie in what he hoped would be a revisionist account, “twentieth-century intellectuals, like their Enlightenment predecessors, had concluded that the eighteenth century was a century when exceedingly repressive Puritan doctrines that had hobbled man’s natural capacities were being rapidly and properly eclipsed by the appealing optimistic faith of the Age of Reason. Edwards, it appeared, was left far behind by a climate of opinion which cooled the fires of hell and brought on the colonial revolution and American independence.”38 In place of that unambiguous way of seeing things, Opie recommended a more nuanced approach. Opie’s Edwards, like May’s later, “has an intellectual and spiritual elusiveness which does not allow the reader to pour him into any pre-cast mold.”39 Edwards, wrote Opie, was one who dabbled in “experimental religion”; he was “the Puritan in the Age of Reason.” Edwards’s “thought and actions always rested directly on

35 36 37 38 39

that an appraisal of Edwards’ History of Redemption is to be based solely on a contrast between the ‘empirical’ history represented by a Voltaire or a Hume and Edwards’s ‘religious propaganda.’ Such a direct comparison is not very illuminating because it fails to take into account the fundamental difference in purpose between what Edwards was doing and the efforts of the Enlightenment thinkers to establish a ‘scientific’ history”; see Jonathan Edwards: Puritan, Preacher, Philosopher (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 134. And, one might also argue that Edwards as historian had things in common with William Robertson, and other enlightened historians who believed Providence shaped historical outcome. Gay, A Loss of Mastery, 116. Gay, A Loss of Mastery, 116. John Opie, ed. Jonathan Edwards and The Enlightenment (Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1969). Opie, Edwards and The Enlightenment, v. Opie, Edwards and The Enlightenment, v.

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the Christian traditions of original sin and irresistible grace, but he also believed with the most sophisticated exponents of the new empirical science that all knowledge was based upon sense experience.”40 Opie’s sympathies lay with Miller who “wrote what is surely the most important book on Jonathan Edwards, at least in terms of the effect it had in convincing other scholars that Edwards was more a product of the new thought of the Enlightenment than Puritan traditionalism.”41 As should be becoming clearer, how Edwards has been situated in an Enlightenment context has depended as much on scholars’ understandings of the Enlightenment as on their understandings of Edwards. When scholars in the 1980s began better to appreciate that Enlightenment was manifested differently in different national contexts, they also came to see that religion and Enlightenment were not always opposed and even often united—especially in eighteenth-century Scotland and America.42 Those developments had implications for Edwards’s historiography; it became easier to envision Edwards within the Enlightenment. Bruce Kuklick could argue, for instance, Philosophy and theology were intertwined for Edwards, but even a cursory examination of his intellectual growth indicates that Calvinist divinity was not the main concern of his youth and early manhood. He mused on the problems plaguing Locke, Newton, Malebranche, and the Cambridge Platonists. His unpublished notes and connected writing suggest that his primary, sustained concern was rationalist metaphysics. In short, he had an intellectualist, philosophical interest in religion.43

Gertrude Himmelfarb agreed and included Edwards within her Enlightenment.44 But other trends of Enlightenment historiography worked against integrating Edwards so easily. American Enlightenment historiography has tended to conflate the American Enlightenment with the American Revolution. For those who see America’s Enlightenment in that way, the political gets center stage, squeezing out Edwards and many others. In his bicentennial book, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977), Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) appeared almost eager to dispense with Edwards: “The Americans were more political-minded than any other people. The whole of their philosophy—now that Jonathan Edwards was out of the way—was really political philosophy, and the whole of their literature, too, or all of it that counted, in the 40 Opie, Edwards and The Enlightenment, vi. 41 Opie, Edwards and The Enlightenment, 22. 42 Important here was Roy S. Porter and Mikulásˇ Teich, eds, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 43 Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), passages quoted at p. 19. 44 See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 212–213.

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long run.”45 Similarly, in Ernest Cassara’s (1925–2015) The Enlightenment in America (1975), a few hasty sentences were sufficient to paint Edwards as a revivalist, one who encouraged “crying out and violent physical contortions.” Edwards’s “emotionalism run wild” was seen as part of a “family argument among the Congregationalists in New England” which “pitted Charles Chauncy of Boston against Jonathan Edward of Northampton.”46 Scholars have since challenged those neat categories too. For Ned C. Landsman, for instance, Edwards and Chauncy shared more than Cassara’s stark contrast permitted. Chauncy was one who had a Scottish honorary degree and “in general drew upon the Moderate Enlightenment.” And Edwards? He “was as much a man of the eighteenth century as was Chauncy.”47 Still, Edwards was not the “modern man” Perry Miller had made him out to be: To Miller, Edwards was a perfect modern, the individual who brought Puritanism into the modern age by pouring its age-old beliefs into the mold of the new empirical philosophy of Newton and Locke. That Edwards was influenced by the new learning is beyond question, but he was hardly the lone scholar in the wilderness that Miller portrayed, in an age in which Enlightened science and literature were becoming staples of eighteenth-century education and discussion.48

Landsman was keen to point out that “Edward’s primary goal in utilizing the new learning was to combat its seemingly secular implications and to preserve as much as possible of the theocentric perspective of early modern Calvinism.”49 But, Robert A. Ferguson has argued, we don’t control what happens to our ideas. In Ferguson’s The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (1997), Edwards makes a brief appearance as one of the “affecting preachers” of the Great Awakening whose “appeal is unprecedented in colonial life.”50 Edwards’s impact however, reached much farther than those he directly affected. For Ferguson, Edwards and those who thought like him set the stage for later millennialists such

45 Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977), 112. Commager commented elsewhere: “Curiously enough the distinction between the philosopher and the Philosophe is more appropriate to the American than to the Old World Enlightenment. For America had no philosophers, not after Jonathan Edwards, anyway, or—if you are amiable in your judgment—James Logan of Philadelphia or Cadwallader Colden of New York or Professor John Winthrop of Cambridge, but it was generously and even lavishly endowed with Philosophes” (p. 241). 46 Ernest Cassara, The Enlightenment in America (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), 136. 47 Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture 1680–1760 (New York: Twayne, 1997), 107–108. 48 Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials, 109. 49 Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials, 109. 50 Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 50.

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as Joseph Bellamy (1719–1790), “Jonathan Edwards’s most influential student.” In this way, Edwards planted seeds that, tended by Bellamy, were harvested in Revolutionary America. After all, Bellamy could write: “let that universal peace and prosperity take place, which indeed will naturally result from the sincere practice of pure christianity, and mankind will naturally increase, and spread, and fill all the earth.” And, argued Ferguson: One does not have to be a convert to respond to this brand of talk. Bellamy’s faith in a different history does not sound that different from Jefferson’s. Glory out of crisis, optimism from revolutionary change, corruption in Europe, deliverance through America, the value placed on union, the miracle of sudden nationality, and the saving rewards of natural prosperity—all of these concepts transpose easily to the political debates of the 1760s and 1770s.51

That way of seeing things complicates the relationship between the American Enlightenment and the American Revolution. If Ferguson is right, Edwards’s impact unfolded in ways that earlier scholars were not attuned to. Caroline Winterer’s recent monograph on the American Enlightenment, however, sees no such revolutionary implications arising from Edwards’s thought. Her book is also one that brings to mind an even older historiography on Edwards, although she does not see that either. Edwards does not figure in significant ways in Winterer’s American Enlightenments.52 She does draw her readers’ attention to Edwards’s 31 October 1723 drawing of a spider swinging thorough the air. Linking that image to Edwards’s reading of Newton’s Opticks (1704), she recounts how the young Yale student had “hopes of catching the eye of London’s scientific community.”53 Edwards sent his “spider letter” to Paul Dudley (1675–1751), a prominent Massachusetts judge and the son of a colonial governor, whose connections with London’s Royal Society Edwards hoped to tap. Sadly, Dudley simply filed the letter away in a desk drawer. For Winterer, “Edwards’s youthful spider letter is significant.” But only for demonstrating how isolated Edwards was; “for showing the many ways in which ideas crossed—and failed to cross—the eighteenth-century Atlantic.”54 Condensing Edwards’s Enlightenment to that single episode ignores a rich historiography, some of which is sketched above. Winterer’s conclusion is also strikingly different from the conclusion reached by thinkers who lived closer to the events she described.

51 Ferguson, p. 53. 52 Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016). 53 Winterer, American Enlightenments, 35. 54 Winterer, American Enlightenments, 35.

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2.5

Edwards through Eighteenth-Century eyes

Some eighteenth-century Americans thought Edwards all too conversant with the expanding transatlantic circulation of ideas. In an “Appendix” to his An Examination of the Late President Edwards’s ‘Enquiry on Freedom of the Will (1770), the Bostonian “Old Light” James Dana (1735–1812) criticized Edwards in this way: “SOME of the most distinguished maintainers of universal necessity, in the last and present century were Hobbs [Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)], Spinoza, Collins [Anthony Collins (1676–1729)], Leibnitz, the authors of Cato’s letters [John Trenchard (1622–1723) and Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750)], Hume, among the Atheists and Deists; and Lord Kaims [Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782)] and Mr. Edwards among the advocates for revelation.”55 He went on to cite parallel passages from Edwards and David Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) to demonstrate how closely Edwards had listened to Hume, the infamous religious sceptic. Other early Americans interpreted Edwards’s connection with the Enlightenment in more generous terms. Edwards made several appearances in Samuel Miller’s (1769–1850) A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803)—a book that some convincingly consider the beginning of American Enlightenment historiography.56 Far from using Edwards to illustrate America’s isolation from the Enlightenment, Edwards’s international reputation provided Miller with a capstone with which to demonstrate eighteenth-century America’s intellectual ascendancy. In his chapter on “Nations lately become Literary,” Miller lamented that “Hitherto scarcely any native American had attracted attention among the learned of Europe, or by his writings or discoveries turned their eyes to this new world.”57 But, things were changing; America had produced Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin: The first persons who attained this honour, in any considerable degree, were the Rev. Mr. JONATHAN EDWARDS, the celebrated theological and metaphysical writer, and Dr. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. Though the genius, talents, and general character of no two persons could be more different; yet each in his way gained high and extensive celebrity, and for the first time convinced the literati of foreign countries, that America had given birth to philosophers who were capable of instructing them.58 55 See “Selection #12. Jonathan Edwards a Humean,” in Mark G. Spencer, Hume’s Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 91–94, passage quoted at p. 93. See also Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 66–67. 56 There is a modern reprinting of Miller’s book with an introductory essay by Roger J. Fechner (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001). 57 Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 volumes (New York, 1803), vol. 2, 348. 58 Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2, 348.

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Miller earlier had introduced “JONATHAN EDWARDS, D.D. late President of Union College, at Schenectady” as “the excellent Son of a still more illustrious Father, whose name was mentioned in a former chapter.” Miller explained that “Besides the great learning and talents displayed by this gentleman on various theological subjects, which will be noticed in their proper place, he published Observations on the Language of the Muhhekaneew Indians, &c. New-Haven, 1788, in which with a number of ingenious remarks on the structure and genius of the language, he gave some curious specimens of its vocabulary.”59 Now, near the conclusion of his extended survey of American learning in the eighteenth century, Miller provided a fuller sketch of Edwards’s life and accomplishments. He discussed Edwards’s earliest years, his schooling at Yale, and his important career as a preacher and educator. “This illustrious man was very respectably learned in the Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages, and also in the mathematics, and natural philosophy; but in theological, moral and metaphysical science, he discovered an acuteness, vigour, and comprehensiveness of mind, which decidedly place him in the very first rank of great men belonging to the age in which he lived.”60 In other words, Edwards—like Franklin—had helped bring America to the general culture of Europe. Through them, America found a place on the Enlightenment world map.61

59 Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2, 120. 60 Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2, 348. For Miller, Edwards’s reputation rested largely on his philosophical writings. Quoting from Samuel Hopkins’s account of Edwards’s reading of Locke at an early age which this essay has noted, Miller wrote: “The fruits of this early initiation into metaphysical science were afterwards laid before the public in his Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will, &c. a work which has been pronounced ‘one of the greatest efforts of the human mind,’ which was received with his approbation in Europe, and which has been, ever since its publication quoted as a great standard work on the subject of which it treats” (vol. 2, p. 348). Among the eighteenth-century European writers who Miller may have had in mind as ones who engaged with Edwards’s work are John Taylor (1694–1761), George Whitefield (1714–1770), Catherine Macaulay (1731–1791), Lawrence Butterworth (1740–1828), and William Godwin (1756–1836). See also, Harold P. Simonson, “Jonathan Edwards and his Scottish Connections,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 21 (1987), 353–376; Christopher W. Mitchell, “Jonathan Edwards’s Scottish Connection,” in David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds, Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 222–247. 61 It is curious that Miller’s parallel discussion of Edwards and Franklin has received little to no scholarly attention from the many scholars who have aimed to contrast the two thinkers. And it is even more curious that when David Levin aimed to soften the contrast that so many had drawn, he did not cite Miller’s Retrospect. Levin wrote in his “Introduction” to The Puritan in the Enlightenment: Franklin and Edwards, “For more than a century American historians have set Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), probably the two greatest minds in eighteenth-century America, opposite one another” (p. 1).

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Mark G. Spencer

Conclusions: Looking Ahead

No doubt, assessments of Edwards’s role within the American Enlightenment and the Enlightenment more generally will continue to ebb and flow. Arguably, in several works of the twenty-first century, Edwards has returned to hold a prominent place in a far-ranging Enlightenment context that Samuel Miller envisioned for him as early as 1803. Still, as accounts of the Enlightenment have become increasingly layered and contextualized, we have also come to know the Enlightenment and Edwards’s place in it in ways that those who lived through it or close to it could not. Several recent scholarly reference works help to illustrate these advances. In 2003, Edwards was one of the few Americans given an individual entry in Oxford University Press’s Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.62 There, Allen C. Guelzo noted that for Edwards “God’s ideas were the origin of everything human minds perceived.” It was that “conviction, along with his welcoming Pietist sensibility as an appropriate response to such perception,” which “places him beside Pascal, Leibnitz, and Berkeley in seeking to wed the new philosophy to old dogmas.” Guelzo’s conclusion: “Edwards is a measure of how successful those efforts could be, and his influence on later American theology and philosophy make him the peer of William James [1842–1910] among America’s most significant religions thinkers.”63 A couple of years later, The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards gave a chapter to “The Age of Enlightenment” as a way of situating Edwards and his thought.64 Not surprisingly, Edwards was also the topic of a main entry in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment,65 a 2015 reference work in which discussions of Edwards and his writings are to be found in several other entries. Among them are ones on Ethan Allen (1738–1789), Autobiography, Isaac Backus (1724–1806), Jeremy Belknap (1744– 1798), Joseph Bellamy (1719–1790), Esther Edwards Burr (1732–1758), Calvinism, Charles Chauncy, Colleges and Universities, Congregationalism, Samuel Davies (1723–1761), Jonathan Dickinson (1688–1747), Dutch Republic and the American Enlightenment, Theodore Dwight (1764–1846), Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), Philip Vickers Fithian (1747–1776), Daniel Fowle (1715–1787), The Great Awakening, Samuel Johnson (1696–1772), Samuel Miller, Moral Philoso62 See Allen C. Guelzo, “Edwards, Jonathan,” in Alan Charles Kors, ed., Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, 4 vols (Oxford University Press, 2003), vol. 1, 390–392. 63 Guelzo, “Edwards, Jonathan,” 392. 64 See Avihu Zakai, “The Age of Enlightenment,” in Stephen J. Stein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 65 See Robert E. Brown, “Edwards, Jonathan,” in Mark G. Spencer, ed., The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, 2 vols (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), vol. 1, 372–383.

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phy, Passions, Philosophical Thought, Presbyterianism, Progress, Reading, Religion, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), Sermons, Ezra Stiles (1727–1795), Solomon Stoddard, Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764), Virtue, Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), and John Witherspoon (1723–1794). Jonathan Edwards, we might say, is now much better integrated into our collective understanding of an expansive Enlightenment than possibly could have been the case when May wrote. At least that is true for the Enlightenment of some. Jonathan I. Israel’s influential account of the Enlightenment—three massive volumes that have rigid categories at their core—dismissed Edwards. The “fervent revivalism” of the Great Awakening was, Israel argued, “socially intensely conservative and hostile to intellectual innovations aspiring to reconfigure social and moral institutions and practices.”66 Edwards was written out in a sentence: “Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), the most learned of the revivalists, evinced a suspicious, antagonistic attitude towards Enlightenment deism, Newtonianism, and secularizing notions of history, and, linked to this, a mostly indifferent or neutral attitude towards slavery, science, economic reorganization, secular education, and politics.”67 Perhaps, but only in part and in ways that were shared with others who unequivocally belong among the enlightened. Israel’s categorical way of seeing things leaves out too many and ignores too much historiography. It ignores the most thorough account we have of Edwards’s philosophy of history (“his sense of time and vision of history”) in the context of the Enlightenment, for instance.68 Avihu Zakai showed how “although he lived on the periphery of the eighteenth-century British empire, Edwards’s thought and actions were an integral part of the transatlantic ‘republic of letters’ and the Protestant world.”69 Zakai portrayed Edwards as a critic of the Enlightenment from whom we might learn more about the Enlightenment and its context. “His lifelong philosophical and theological controversies with contemporary scientific, historical, and moral strains of thought,” Zakai argued, “show that not only

66 Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 465. 67 Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 465. 68 See Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), passage quoted at p. xiii. See also Zakai’s “Jonathan Edwards, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of Protestant Tradition in America,” in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds. The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). See also Josh Moody, Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment: Knowing the Presence of God (University Press of America, 2005), for an account that sees Edwards employing Enlightenment language to support Reformed theology. 69 Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 327.

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adaptation and replication but also opposition to European intellectual traditions played a part in the creation of the Atlantic world.”70 Pigeonholing Edwards as Israel and others have done as “a hellfire revivalist” and “a pessimistic prophet of eternal damnation” obscures many things. Combating that “age-old reputation,” Ronald Story, like Zakai, recently asked us to see Edwards as “a full participant in a burgeoning eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ that transmitted Enlightenment opinion on the efficacy of human reason throughout Europe and North America.”71 For Story that context showed Edwards to be, along with everything else he was—“an intellectual, a Calvinist, a revivalist, and a scold”72—an “improver,” even an “optimistic” one. Edwards, he wrote, was “a profoundly social minister” who wanted to make the world a better place.73 “Love advancing in harmony with learning, technology, and trade is what filled Edwards with hope for the coming of the good society.”74 That is a long way from Parrington’s effort to fashion Edwards an anachronism in the world of the American Enlightenment. Hopefully, the chapters in Jonathan Edwards within the Enlightenment: Controversy, Experience, and Thought will revisit and extend some of the many and longstanding debates about how best to situate Edwards in the contexts of the Enlightenment. It may be hoped, as well, that the volume will open up and develop new lines of inquiry, in part by highlighting an historiography that Edwards scholars have not often considered in their efforts to situate Edwards in the Enlightenment—the Enlightenment’s darker sides. Since the 1960s, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and other post-structuralist and post-modernist thinkers, first in France and then elsewhere, have been concerned to show that the Enlightenment was not all sweetness and light.75 The enlightened in America, and elsewhere, for instance, often thought, wrote and acted to expand freedom and liberty for some while holding on to notions of gender inequality and an ingrained racism that facilitated chattel slavery based on the color of one’s skin. Fuller understandings of the American Enlightenment have attempted to rec70 Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 325–327. 71 Ronald Story, Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love (Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 9, 122. 72 Story, Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love, 50. 73 Story, Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love, 122. 74 Story, Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love, 125. 75 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), and “What is Critique?” in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, ed. by James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). See also Daniel Gordon, ed. Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New perspectives in eighteenth-century French intellectual history (New York: Routledge, 2001); Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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oncile—or at least make sense of—the Enlightenment’s many progressive parts alongside its darker dimensions.76 Where does Edwards fit within that expanded context? Exploring the answers will deepen our understanding of Edwards and of the American Enlightenment.77 Still, one suspects Henry F. May’s circumspect conclusion about the problem of categorizing Edwards will remain no less relevant, and no less enlightened.

76 See Joyce Appleby, “The Enlightenment Project in a Postmodernist Age,” chapter 5 in Appleby, A Restless Past: History and the American Public (2007), 109–122. 77 For some initial steps to incorporate these “dark enlightenment” topics into Edwards studies, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 4 (2002), 23–59, an effort to consider Edwards as both a slave owner and one who defended colonial New England’s practice of domestic slavery. On the topic of Edwards and Native Americans, see Gerald R. McDermott, “Missions and Native Americans,” in The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Sang Hyun Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), and several works by Rachel M. Wheeler, including her monograph, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

Controversies

John Howard Smith (Texas A&M University-Commerce)

“God Has Made Us to Differ” Jonathan Edwards, the Enlightenment, and the American Indian

3.1

Introduction

Jonathan Edwards, newly installed as the pastor of the Stockbridge Mahican Indian mission in western Massachusetts, approached the simple pulpit of the meetinghouse to deliver his inaugural sermon on a characteristically cold day in January 1751. He chose as his biblical text two verses from the eleventh chapter of the Book of Acts, about a Roman centurion named Cornelius who “had heard something of the true G[od] before Peter came to Him but . . . did not know anything about J[esus] [Christ].” However, Cornelius proved “willing to be instructed,” having “a mind to know more,” and so he “prayed to G[od] that he might be brought into the Light.” Like Peter who had preached to and converted Cornelius and his family, so he, Edwards told his Indian audience, “am come to preach the true Relig[ion] to you & your Childr[en] . . . [so] that you & all your chil[dren] may be saved.” It was a natural choice for Edwards’s first sermon to his Indian flock, setting a tone for his seven-year pastorate at Stockbridge in terms of how he viewed his undertaking among a people that he regarded as savage and nearly subhuman.1 Edwards had recently been ousted from his pastorate at Northampton on account of his rejection of the general trend toward Arminianism that had been steadily liberalizing Calvinism throughout New England, as well as the strictness with which he meted out church discipline. Although renowned throughout New England as a deeply learned theologian and energizing preacher—most famous for his hellfire and brimstone sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741)—his insistence that only “visible saints” may partake in communion, and that church membership applicants undergo an arduous process of self-examination and clerical interrogation, compounded by a quick readiness to punish 1 WJE 25:571.

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even mild lapses in discipline, alienated him from his parishioners. But the hottest flames of the revivals had died down somewhat in the wake of King George’s War (1744–48), the scorching radicalism of evangelical firebrands such as James Davenport, Jr. and Gilbert Tennent effectively quenched by the cautious and moderate influence of Edwards and others. Edwards’s support for the New Lights, and his conviction that the revivals heralded the first dawning days of the Millennium, led him toward a stricter Calvinist conception of sin and grace than he already held when he took over the Northampton church for his theologically liberal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard in 1727. The result was a groundswell of criticism and acrimony that ended in his ejection from his pulpit in 1750. At a loose end, he eventually accepted an invitation to lead the Stockbridge mission after briefly considering a plea from his Northampton supporters to minister to a breakaway congregation there.2 The Stockbridge mission began as a project conceived by the evangelically inclined governor of Massachusetts, Jonathan Belcher, in 1730. Refugee Mahican and Housatunnuck Indians living in the western end of the colony expressed a desire for a Christian missionary to be sent to them as part of a bid for English patronage. Edwards’s brother-in–law, Samuel Hopkins, received their formal request and conveyed it in 1734 to the newly established New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel (NEC) among the Indians in New England. The NEC dispatched John Sergeant and Timothy Woodbridge to a generous allotment of land located about fifty miles west of Springfield granted to the Commissioners by Governor Belcher in 1736. Over the next three years they and the first cohort of Indian residents built the Stockbridge Mission House, as well as simple houses for the Indian families on lots adjacent to the Housatonic River. Four white families, the most prominent of which was that of Edwards’s uncle, Ephraim Williams, received permission to settle at Stockbridge, and they built houses on hills overlooking the main town that reached completion in 1739. Additional sponsorship came from the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, located in London and led by Rev. Isaac Hollis, an emergent evangelical Baptist. In spite of the enthusiasm of its patrons, the Stockbridge mission got off to a shaky start due to ingrained prejudices held by white colonists against Indians in general, and their general skepticism about Indians evincing a genuine desire to be converted to Christianity.3

2 John Howard Smith, The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725– 1775 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 91–92; George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 345–374. 3 Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 47– 76; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 375–376, 377.

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Indians and Christianity

From the very beginning of European reconnaissance and colonization of the “New World,” the native peoples with whom the newcomers came into contact occupied a strange, contradictory place in the European psyche: at once the simulacra of Adam and Eve, but simultaneously presumed to be the vicious, drooling minions of Satan. Christopher Columbus, describing the natives of Hispaniola in 1493, marveled at these “well-built people of handsome stature, . . . so artless and free with all they possess . . . content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them.” He surmised that they would make excellent Christian converts, as well as “servants.” On his second voyage to the West Indies he had lost his sense of wonder, replacing it with the rapacity of a conqueror aflame with religious zeal. The Spanish Conquistadores who followed were no less savage, pledging that if met with anything less than abject submission they would bring “war against [them] in all ways and manners that we can.” In the meantime, Western European readers devoured travelers’ tales— authentic and fabricated—of headless natives with their faces in their chests, of people with dogs’ heads who drank blood, and of naked savages cannibalizing each other as well as the unwary explorer. The fact that most of such accounts were entirely false meant nothing when the fantasy provided a justification for conquest, dislocation, and enslavement. Conversion to Christianity, on the other hand, was a trickier matter, but for the most part the Spanish relied upon blunt demands for conversion and harsh punishments for refusal or resistance.4 The French who settled much of present-day Canada and the pays d’en haut around the Great Lakes pursued a more thoughtful approach to Indian relations grounded mainly in practical and economic concerns. By treating their Indian neighbors as partners and potential Catholic converts to be eased—increasingly under Jesuit influence—into Christianity, in contraposition to the Spanish example, the French colonists perceived the sauvages less as a latent threat and more as a kind of Lockean tabula rasa. This began with the sixteenth-century intellectual Michel de Montaigne, who joined others of his peers in characterizing the Indians as a people “ni foi, ni roi, ni loi” (“no faith, no king, no law”) and thus as little more than animals, though still ripe for civilizational uplift. The eighteenth-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, best exem4 “Columbus’s Letter to the Sovereigns on His First Voyage, 15 February-4 March, 1493,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: Heritage Press, 1963), 183; “Spain Requires the Indians to Submit to Spanish Authority, 1513,” in Albert L. Hurtado and Peter Iverson, eds., Major Problems in American Indian History, 2nd ed. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage, 2001), 59; David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 62–75, 197–198, 218.

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plified this more general French attitude toward the Indians as “only an animal of the first order,” and as “[a] being of little consequence, a kind of powerless automaton, incapable of reforming or reinforcing nature.” However, based on voluminous reports from Jesuit missionaries and colonial officials, most French philosophes agreed with Jean-Jacques Rousseau that the American Indian represented l’homme naturel, le bon sauvage of the post-Adamite period of human development confirming physiocratic theories of societal progression propagated throughout Western Europe.5 By slight contrast, the indigenous peoples of eastern North America colonized by the English were generally depicted as barbarous, irredeemable savages, though occasionally useful as trading partners, frontier guides and military adjuncts in the occasional imperial war. As neighbors they were inscrutable, impossible wholly to trust. From a governmental standpoint they were a necessary evil, as much a hindrance as a help in the pursuit of colonial and imperial objectives. While every colonial charter listed the conversion of the Indians to Christianity as a primary goal, and this was ostensibly the key objective of the Massachusetts Bay Company venture, with the colonial seal depicting an almost totally naked Indian begging “Come Over and Help Us,” organized efforts to accomplish this were often desultory at best. Widespread clerical disinterest accounts for much of this, but just as much can be attributed to a marked lack of interest among the Indians themselves, who struggled to find affinity for a religion that justified their dispossession and subjugation. Daniel Gookin, writing just after the conclusion of Metacomet’s War (also known as King Philip’s War) in 1677, lamented that the Mohegans proved “averse to entertain[ing the] Christian religion,” and Jonathan Parsons of West Lyme, Connecticut noted that before 1740 “nothing seem’d to have any considerable Effect” upon the Mohegans and Niantics when he and a few other clergymen attempted to evangelize them.6 Rev. John Eliot’s translation of the Bible into Wôpanâak (Massachusett) and establishment of several “praying towns” throughout the Bay Colony in the middle decades of the seventeenth century constituted the most vigorous attempt at Christianization ever made before the First Great Awakening. However, 5 Cornelius J. Jaenen, “’Les Sauvages Ameriquains’: Persistence into the 18th Century of Traditional French Concepts and Constructs for Comprehending Amerindians,” Ethnohistory 29 (Winter 1982), 43–56; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976). 6 Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of Christian Indians of New England in 1675, 1676, and 1677, in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (Cambridge.: Folsom, Wells, and Thursdton, 1836), 435; Thomas Prince, Sr., ed., The Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain and America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1744, 1745), 2:154; Smith, The First Great Awakening, 253.

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Eliot’s strict rules for praying town residents, reflective of a stark all-or-nothing approach to Indian embrace of Christianity, coupled with settler abuses that included outright theft of newly improved Christian Indian lands, plagued the praying towns with chronic instability. New converts found the forced separation from their families and friends too much to endure or grew disenchanted by the general lack of acceptance from white neighbors, and inexorably drifted away, never to return. Those who managed to stay were more often than not treated with disdain or outright suspicion by white colonists. Eliot’s difficulty in recruiting clergy willing to serve as missionaries proved the greatest obstacle to the scheme, which teetered on the brink of collapse before the outbreak of Metacomet’s War in 1675 finally destroyed the project altogether. Mary Rowlandson, in her celebrated narrative of her ordeal as a captive of Metacomet’s war party, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), heaped bitter vituperation upon the Praying Indians, whom she regarded as false Christians and latent insurgents. The absence of any further missionary outreach to the Indians in subsequent decades led a frustrated Solomon Stoddard in 1723 to publish a scathing indictment of his colleagues for their collective indolence, even as he believed that recalcitrantly pagan Indians were “wolves” that should be hunted down and destroyed as vermin.7 Stoddard found this clerical indifference both baffling and appalling for, like many of his colleagues, he believed that the Indians were the descendants of a lost tribe of Israel that had been led astray by Satan to settle in the Americas, where they degenerated into cruel and bloodthirsty brutes who worshipped the devil. Edwards likewise shared this belief, lamenting that the Indians had become “the devil’s captives,” and that their nations constituted part of a vast “kingdom of Satan” destined to be destroyed by Anglo-Protestant civilization and evangelism. However, agreeing with his grandfather, Edwards believed that missionary work among the Indians was not only a moral imperative, but a necessary step toward the fulfillment of John Winthrop’s millenarian vision for the “city on a hill,” the “flourishing of Christ’s kingdom on earth.” The neglect of this imperative constituted a grave dereliction of religious duty for, as it was, Edwards wrote, “The devil sucks [Indian] blood,” drawing strength with which he fought against God’s elect. Notwithstanding these relatively progressive views, he never volunteered for missionary service himself before accepting the position at Stockbridge, preferring instead to applaud the efforts of others, most notably David Brainerd, 7 Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 31 (Jan. 1974), 27–54; Solomon Stoddard, Question, Whether God Is Not Angry with the Country for Doing So Little towards the Conversion of the Indians? (Boston, 1723); Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 117; Solomon Stoddard to Gov. Joseph Dudley, 22 Oct. 1703, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 4th Ser., 2 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society,1854), 235–237.

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who labored among the refugee communities of the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania.8

3.3

Edwards’s Early Opinion about Indians and Christianization

Edwards also shared with his fellow white colonists a number of presumptions about Indian culture rooted in white Anglo-Protestant racial and cultural superiority in opposition to pagan Indian barbarism that began with the very first contacts between Europeans and Native peoples. By the time Edwards had begun his ministerial career, printers struggled to keep up with popular demand for lurid accounts of Indian atrocities inflicted upon each other and, more importantly, against hapless white captives—mainly women. Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity and redemption remained highly popular and widely read in the early eighteenth century, closely followed by Cotton Mather’s 1697 description of Hannah Dustan’s ordeal and Rev. John Williams’s 1707 relation of his travails following the Franco-Indian raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704. In these and other such works could be found cold-blooded murder, satanic worship, cannibalism, and gruesome descriptions of ritual torture suffered by white colonists, the protagonists enduring only through their faith in God and the certainty of their racial superiority. Edwards himself was not untouched by the violence of the New England frontier, as he lost members of his mother’s family, an aunt and two cousins, in the Deerfield raid, while his uncle and four other cousins were briefly taken captive. The patient acceptance and endurance of suffering was a hallmark of Christian piety and devotion, even as it was also a subject of morbid popular fascination. However, while the pietistic focus upon the suffering of Christ on the cross and the torturous martyrdom of Protestant victims of the Catholic Inquisition were thought to be spiritually edifying, the Indian valuing of pain’s edifying nature could be nothing but rank barbarism.9 Consequently, Edwards saw nothing in Indian cultures worthy of intellectual consideration, and before arriving at Stockbridge, could not see Indians themselves as anything other than animals mindlessly doing their satanic master’s 8 WJE, 9:155, 433–434; WJE, 7:155, 433–434; idem., sermon on 1 John 3:10 (1756), sermon on Luke 19:10 (1751), sermon on Acts 14:26 (1753), sermon on Rev. 3:15 (1729), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. See also David S. Lovejoy, “Satanizing the American Indian,” New England Quarterly 67 (Dec. 1994), 603–621. 9 Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereigntie and Goodness of God (Boston, 1682); Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Boston, 1702); John Williams, The Redeemed Captive Returned to Zion (Boston, 1709); Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 14–17; David A. Richards, “The Memorable Preservations: Narratives of Indian Captivity in the Literature and Politics of Colonial New England, 1675–1725,” unpublished Yale College thesis, 1967.

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bidding, much like their African counterparts. As for the traditional religions Indians practiced, they were nothing more than variations of satanic idolatry, and thus merited only eradication rather than even the most peremptory study. French Jesuit missionaries in Canada had taken an almost anthropological approach to their missionary endeavors, painstakingly chronicling Indian culture, lore and religious practices in order to find common ground with Catholic Christianity as a means to conversion, and with no small amount of success. Edwards and his Reformed colleagues, however, took this as further proof of Catholicism’s inherently idolatrous nature and its being the faith of the Antichrist, whose armies would certainly include both pagan and Catholic Indian warriors. As the revivals of the First Great Awakening began among scattered congregations of Congregational and Presbyterian churches in New England and the Pennsylvania-New Jersey borderlands, including his own church at Northampton, Edwards grew ever hopeful that the tide was turning against Satan and the Antichrist once and for all.10 Nowhere was this more obvious to him than in the optimistic reports submitted by the evangelical brothers John and David Brainerd, the latter of whom noted that the Indians of Juniata had demonstrated an earnest “disposition” to receive his ministrations and listen to the word of God. Unlike most Indians he had encountered elsewhere, David Brainerd rejoiced at the relative lack of prejudice against Christianity among Indians living on the fringes of EuroAmerican settlement and beyond. An Enlightenment imperative was the uplifting of all of humanity to higher levels of civilized thinking and behavior, which for most philosophes included the propagation of Christian virtues, if not always Christian practice. Missionaries to Indian Country, as agents of European imperialism, subscribed to the fulfillment of this lofty objective and, as Edwards repeatedly emphasized in his “Life of David Brainerd,” in this regard the young evangelical proselyte was well suited to his mission. As one who quickly embraced the radical revivalism of the Awakening, Brainerd focused intently upon the notion of suffering, both spiritual and physical, that attended true conversion. Even as many traditional Indian cultures placed a high value upon the endurance of suffering as marks of both physical and spiritual strength, so Brainerd seized upon this as a door into which he could introduce Christianity.11

10 Edwards, History of the Work of Redemption, 472, 480; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 4–5; Peter A. Dorsey, “Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 55 (July 1998), 399–420; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 122; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 198. 11 WJE 7:329; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 323–334.

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However, as most missionaries to Indian Country learned upon their first arrival to a Native village, Brainerd immediately encountered cordial, but firm resistance. More than one sachem interrogated him on why he “desired the Indians to become Christians, seeing the Christians were so much worse than the Indians in their present state,” while others suspected that his designs were not religious, but imperial. One, Brainerd reported, accused him of coming “to make [Indians] slaves . . . and make them fight with the People over the water,” meaning the French and the Spanish. He could only assure them that this was not the case, and very rarely he met with a modicum of success when individual Indians sought him out to inquire about religious matters, netting him a handful of conversions. Being inclined by his personality to embrace his own suffering for his faith, Brainerd took the challenges of working among skeptical, even hostile, Indians as most likely bringing down upon him a torrent of sufferings that would save not only pagan souls, but his own as well. Through “many difficulties and hardships,” he believed that he would eventually tear down their “prejudices against Christianity.” For the small degree of success he did enjoy, he often encountered tribesmen who were not disposed to abandoning their traditional faiths entirely.12

3.4

The Indian Great Awakening

At Juniata, on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1745, Brainerd encountered “a devout and zealous reformer” dressed in “pontifical garb, which was a coat of bears’ skins, . . . bearskin stockings” and wearing an amazing wooden mask “with an extravagant mouth, cut very much awry.” The “powwow” approached Brainerd, who “could not but shrink away from him, . . . his appearance and gestures were so prodigiously frightful!” However, Brainerd suppressed his fear and spent a considerable amount of time in religious conversation with the self-proclaimed prophet, whom he found to be “sincere, honest and conscientious.” This “Reformer,” as Brainerd dubbed him, believed he had been called to reproach his people for having become “very degenerate and corrupt,” enfeebled by rampant alcohol addiction, materialism, and neglect of their ancient religions. Traveling from village to village, summoning his audiences to attention with a great tortoiseshell rattle and performing a ritual dance, The Reformer castigated spiritually neglectful Indians as traitors to their people and to the Master of Life, who had withdrawn his protection as a divine punishment. The only remedy for their 12 Ebenezer Pemberton, An Appendix, Containing a Short Account of the Endeavors . . . to Introduce the Gospel among the Indians upon the Border of New-York, &c. (Boston, 1744), 32– 38.

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malaise and powerlessness, he declared, would be the revival—really the reinvention—of the old religion, and the price for failure was complete destruction. The Reformer “treated me with uncommon courtesy,” and “his sentiments seemed very just,” leading Brainerd to admit that “there was something in his temper and disposition that looked more like true religion than anything I ever observed amongst other heathens.”13 As Brainerd had begun to witness, Indian peoples living on the Pennsylvania frontier experienced their own religious awakening in the years preceding the Seven Years’ War. Self-proclaimed “prophets” itinerated throughout Indian Country preaching unity and religious renewal, some angrily militant in calling for a rollback of colonialism, while others argued for a focus upon internal reform. This appeared to follow in the immediate wake of a concerted effort by New England’s political and religious leaders in Old and New England to Christianize New England’s Indian tribes through the NEC, which argued that mass Christianization would create communities of sober, industrious, and— more importantly—docile Indians. An early missionary excursion through southern New England in 1713–14, led by Rev. Experience Mayhew, was well received by Connecticut’s and Rhode Island’s magistrates, but came against muted enthusiasm from most of his fellow clergymen, and more importantly elicited very little interest from the Indians themselves. Narragansett sachem Ninigret summed up Indian disinterest when he told Mayhew that he would do better to “make the English good in the first place,” before presuming to proselytize among his people. Undeterred, the NEC financed several missionary endeavors to southern New England’s tribes, establishing schools for English instruction, among the most successful of which was Stockbridge. A similar town populated by Christian Pequots founded in Connecticut inspired the Connecticut General Assembly to pass an act in 1736 requiring “a contribution [from] every ecclesiastical society or parish in this government” for “civilizing and Christianizing of the Indian natives in this Colony.”14 “It is no small Part of the wonderful Dispensation of the Grace of God in the present Day,” wrote an awestruck Thomas Prince, Jr. in his evangelical magazine, The Christian History, to learn of “the surprizing Effusion of his Spirit on diverse Tribes of Indians in these Ends of the Earth, who wou’d never before so much as outwardly receive the Gospel, notwithstanding the Attempts which have been 13 WJE 7:330. 14 Experience Mayhew, “A Brief Journal of My Visitation of the Pequot and Mohgin Indians . . . 1713,” in Some Correspondence between the Governors and Treasurers of the New England Company in London (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1896), 101; Charles J. Hoadly, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 15 vols. (Hartford: Lockwood & Brainard Co., 1850–1890), 8:38; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 37–49, 57–59, 63–64; Smith, The First Great Awakening, 258–265.

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made this hundred Years to persuade them to it.” During the height of the Awakening in New England, white evangelicals enjoyed modest success among the Indians, but faced persistent skepticism and resistance. Conversions were more often than not ephemeral, but the New Lights nevertheless reported that pockets of semi-assimilated Indians expressed interest in Christian instruction, claiming to have been drawn to revivalist preaching. This confirmed for New Lights the validity of charismatic evangelicalism, and that a momentous spiritual transformation was under way in America. What the New Lights failed to understand was that the appearances of a sudden outpouring of the spirit upon the Indians took place among disconnected, demoralized communities of Indians surrounded by and in constant contact with Anglo-American colonists. The only way forward for them was to take the next logical steps toward greater assimilation.15 New Lights who worked in Christianized Indian communities claimed an equivalent degree of religious enthusiasm to that found among white audiences. David Brainerd observed that his Delaware audiences “were much affected & many in much distress; & some could neither go, nor stand; but lay flat on the ground as if stab’d at heart: Crying incessantly for mercy.” Joseph Park, an NEC missionary who worked on the Narragansett reservation at Westerly, Rhode Island, spent several frustrating years trying to make some headway against the Indians’ courteous disinterest until 1743, when he reported “a great Sense of spiritual and eternal Things” finally turning them around during a particularly enlivening sermon. “A SPIRIT of Prayer and Supplication was poured out upon them; and a SPIRIT of Conviction upon the Enemies of God” came upon them to such a degree that he “was unable to continue . . . by Reason of the Outcry.” Moravian missionaries were arguably the most successful, recording significant interest from would-be Iroquois and Delaware converts who found the Moravian emphasis upon Christ’s physical suffering and the blood issuing from his many wounds highly compelling. August Gottlieb Spagenburg recounted his journey to the Iroquois capitol at Onondaga, where he performed a bloodletting ritual on the sachem Canassatego to relieve his suffering from smallpox.16

15 Prince, The Christian History, 2:21; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 225–235; Julius H. Rubin, Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 19– 24. 16 Edwards, Life of David Brainerd, 307; Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood,” 726–730; Prince, The Christian History, 1:208; Simmons, “Red Yankees,” 261–262; John W. Jordan, ed., “Spangenberg’s Notes of Travel to Onondaga in 1745,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 2, no. 4 (1878), 430; Smith, The First Great Awakening, 252–253, 256–257.

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There is no question that Christianity exerted considerable influence over Indian religious life, altering aspects of belief and ritual practices everywhere Indians and colonists came into contact with each other. Where Native communities suffered the greatest damage from disease and war, the embrace of Christianity marked a desperate effort to cope with apocalyptic events. In other cases, Christianity presented opportunities to restore cosmic coherence in the face of chaos, as well as being a strategy for maintaining elite status within a tribal community or to attain higher rank and cultivate greater that was once impossible in the past. Colonial governments did favor tribal connections where sachems espoused Christianity or at least gave permission for Christian missionaries to proselytize in their communities, bringing economic and political benefits. The Oneidas and Mohawks of New York, the Lenape in Pennsylvania, and the Southern Algonquian tribes of New England all employed a variety of these strategies to preserve dwindling territories and gain military protection from aggressive close-neighboring colonial governments or more powerful Indian nations. Non-Christian Indians frequently incorporated aspects of Christian theology and practice into their extant religions when they were closely analogous—a process known as syncretism—though this does not constitute a prerequisite to the advent of religious revivalism in Native communities.17 These and other instances of Indian interest in Christianity led Edwards, while continuing to harbor a dim view of indigenous cultures, to believe nonetheless that all human beings are of equal spiritual value in the eyes of God. In his public and private thoughts on missionary outreach to Indian communities, he ventured to predict that most would ultimately convert to the true faith and live among white and black brothers and sisters in the millennial kingdom as saints. This was, for the time, a relatively radical opinion, since most white colonists hated and feared all Indians, regardless of their tribal identity, and most of Edwards’s ministerial colleagues presumed them all to be hell-bound. While Edwards certainly acknowledged the Indian capacity for cruelty and atrocity, he was quick to point out in a sermon preached to a contingent of Mohawks gathered at Albany that “We [whites] are no better than you in no Respect, only as God has made us to differ and has been pleased to give us more light,” echoing Indian complaints about white depravity. He averred that Europeans once languished in ignorant barbarism before the blessings of Christianity civilized them centuries ago, then went on to list the various sins to which Indians gave themselves, singling out “drunkenness” and repeating rumors of torture and cannibalism. However, he again admitted that “many white people flatter the Indians 17 Simmons, “Red Yankees,” 253–271; Daniel K. Richter, “’Some of Them . . . Would Always Have a Minister with Them’: Mohawk Protestantism, 1683–1719,” American Indian Quarterly 16 (Autumn 1992), 471–484; Smith, The First Great Awakening, 264–265.

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in their wickedness; for they live in wickedness and flatter one another in it.” Doubtless cognizant of the colonists’ uncharitable treatment of Indians, Edwards assured his Mohawk audience that the Indians had long suffered from the whites’ “shameful neglect . . . by which the great God has undoubtedly been made very angry.”18

3.5

Edwards at Stockbridge

Edwards arrived at Stockbridge in August 1751 knowing that he had his work cut out for him. Writing to the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives shortly after his arrival, he worried about inroads made by the French among the Iroquois in both the diplomatic and religious arenas that may, through the Mohawks, negatively influence the Mahicans. “[Iroquois] Indians that used formerly to appear on the side of the English are continually in great multitudes flocking to Canada. . . [A]ll the far nations that used to be our friends, had lately left us, and had entered into alliance with the French.” This gave Edwards a sense of purpose that his efforts with the Mahicans can turn the tide back toward Anglo-American Protestantism, and in this he opined that “God in his providence seems now to be opening the door for the introducing the light of the gospel among these nations, more than ever [he] has done before.” The key for Edwards lay in the Indian parents’ love for their children, which he believed motivated their requests for English education and Christian instruction. “This opportunity,” he warned, “may easily be lost by our negligence,” given the still high degree of skepticism and resistance to Christianization he knew still existed. Thus, much like Brainerd, Edwards embraced the prospect that, to his mind, he may be walking directly toward his own martyrdom, and he almost certainly regarded Stockbridge as a kind of punitive exile to be endured.19 Edwards took his ministerial duties at Stockbridge quite seriously even as he may still have regarded his appointment as a temporary expediency while hoping that an offer more favorable to his ministerial ambitions would be forthcoming. An early and most frustrating obstacle was the Stockbridge Indians’ illiteracy in English, and so he committed himself to their primary education. Failure in teaching Indians English meant the failure of the entire missionary enterprise, he believed, and those few who suggested that the Bible be translated into Indian languages—as John Eliot had done with Southern Algonquian the previous 18 Edwards, sermon on 2 Peter 1:19 (1751), published as “To the Mohawks at the Treaty,” in Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds., The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 105–110. 19 WJE 16:399–401.

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century—were grievously in error. In a letter to Sir William Pepperell, he summed up not just his opinion about the Mahican language, but about the Indians as an unassimilated race. “Indian languages are extremely barbarous and barren,” he thought, “and very ill-fitted for communicating things moral and divine, or even things speculative and abstract. In short, they are wholly unfit for a people possessed of civilization, knowledge, and refinement.” What English language instruction his new charges had, Edwards found to his dismay, was a best superficial. “[T]he children learn to read, to make such sounds on the sight of such marks; but know nothing what they say, and have neither profit nor entertainment by what they read, they neglect it when they leave school, and quickly lost [it].” To counteract this, which he attributed to stale rote-learning, he emphasized an immersive style of teaching that included teaching the children to sing standard Puritan hymns. “Music, especially sacred music,” he wrote to Pepperell, “has a powerful efficacy to . . . give the mind a relish for objects of a superior character.”20 Insisting upon the greater importance for the Indians to learn English on account of the “barbarous” nature of their languages, not surprisingly he was vehemently disinclined to learn Mahican to facilitate this work. Nevertheless, he managed to pick up enough of the language to communicate with some of the youngest and oldest members of his congregation using a combination of Mahican, English, and improvised sign language. Unwilling to do so to any real extent himself, Edwards did push his son, Jonathan Jr., to learn Mahican so that he might act as a translator until such time as the Indians has mastered English. Not only was this insufficiency in English an insurmountable obstacle to their Christianization, Edwards believed, but it also left them vulnerable to exploitation by their white neighbors and colonial officials. Signs of this were readily apparent to visitors, who could not fail to notice that the Indians’ houses were falling into disrepair, as was the schoolhouse21 To that end, Edwards pored through copies of treaties signed between the Mahicans, Mohawks, and other tribes with the Massachusetts government, and encompassed the degree to which the Indians had been exploited and abused as a matter of policy. Indian suspicions of, and downright hostility to, the AngloAmericans became to him increasingly understandable. “The English have not only greatly failed of their duty in so neglecting the instruction of the Indians, but we have been extremely impolitic,” he concluded in a letter to Joseph Paice, a Presbyterian patron in London, “and by our negligence in this matter have brought the whole [of] British America into very difficult and dangerous circumstances, which I am much more sensible of since I have been in [Stock20 WJE 16:413; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 388–390. 21 WJE 16:552–562, 666–667.

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bridge]. . .” This had proven to be a great boon to the French, who encouraged the Iroquois to believe persistent rumors that the Anglo-Americans would enslave children entrusted to their schools. What Edwards certainly did not realize was that the Mahicans’ interest in English education may have had nothing to do with the saving of their souls.22 Indian interest in English education rarely arose from a genuine desire for assimilation to white Anglo-American society, but was instead a strategic acceptance and reworking of elements of Anglo-American culture to meet unique collective and individual needs. They unfailingly resisted Christianization in favor of English education. When Rev. Eliphalet Adams met with a group of southern Algonquian leaders in 1732 to convince them to allow resident missionaries to preach to their communities, they informed him that similar schemes had been pitched to them before, “but they [the Indians] never well understood it; they were afraid they should not understand it now, and wished that the preaching might be deferred till they were able to understand it.” Invariably, missionaries laboring in Indian communities refused to understand resistance to Christianization as anything other than satanic influence and were correct in regarding their acceptance of certain Christian rites and teachings with some skepticism. It must be stressed that Indians incorporated aspects of Christian theology and practice into their traditional religion less from any authentic belief, but more as a strategy for generating Anglo-American benevolence. The partial assumption and adaptation of Christianity and English education often proved controversial, and there were heated arguments within Indian communities over the wisdom of cultural accommodation, even as there were parallel arguments among colonial religious and political leaders about Indian motives.23 Another factor playing heavily into Indian disaffection with the English education they genuinely sought to obtain had to do with in-fighting among various groups and individuals involved in missionary and educational endeavors through the auspices of the NEC and Hollis’s Company for the Propagation of the Gospel. Stockbridge, being populated by a mixture of Indian and white residents, meant persistent tensions between the two groups that flared into acrimony over land disputes, with the Williamses taking what advantages they could, oftentimes at the Indians’ expense. John Sergeant managed to curb the more blatant attempts at abuse and insisted that Stockbridge remain populated mostly by Christian Indians. When Sergeant died unexpectedly in 1749, an argument erupted over who should succeed him, fueled in part by the divisions engendered 22 WJE 16: 436. 23 Frances Manwaring Caulkins, Memoir of the Rev. William Adams, of Dedham, Mass: and of the Rev. Eliphalet Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 35; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 57–59, 63–64.

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by the Awakening. The Williamses favored the soft antirevivalist Ezra Stiles, who had also become enamored of Ephraim’s daughter and Sergeant’s widow, Abigail. Timothy Woodbridge, who was a proponent of revivalism, saw to it that Stiles’s ambitions to take over for Sergeant (in more ways than one) were squelched, with substantial support from the Mahican residents. The choice of Edwards over Stiles reflects Woodbridge’s New Light inclinations and the Indian preference for evangelicalism, while the Old Light-leaning Williamses fretted that Stockbridge would become a radical New Light enclave.24 Edwards assumed his post at a point that seemed to augur well for the success of his work. The argument between Woodbridge and the Williamses had begun to subside, and an agreement concluded with the Mohawks of the Iroquois Six Nations earlier that summer to bring children from their nearby villages in New York to a newly constructed boarding school promised to position Stockbridge “as the potential hub of New England missions.” The Edwards family settled into their new home, warmly welcomed by the Indian residents, who “seem much pleased with my family, especially my wife,” and the feelings were mutual. “They like the place far better than they expected,” he reported to his father. Although a new argument arose between Edwards and the Williamses over who should run the boarding school, which Edwards initially won, simmering conflicts over the management of the boarding school and Edwards’s growing suspicions that the Williamses were using Stockbridge to generate an income through land speculation fed a protracted family feud that ultimately destroyed Stockbridge as a mission town. The Mohawks withdrew their children in disgust, and the Mahican residents began to declare their intention to abandon the town, while angrier young men began to murmur about exploitation and abuse from their white neighbors, as well as the malignancy of Anglo-American “protection,” and openly considered a violent expulsion of the whites. Frayed relations were somewhat repaired, largely through Edwards’s exhausting efforts, and Edwards continued to teach the relatively few students still remaining, but nerves remained raw as fresh rumors of war trickled in from all over the frontier in the summer of 1754.25 The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War—known in the colonies as the French and Indian War—in 1754–55 sparked a wave of anxiety and fear throughout western Massachusetts that a bloodier, more destructive replay of the conflicts of previous decades may once again be starting. Edwards, radiating calm acceptance of whatever God’s will may be, repeatedly assured his white and Indian audiences in the first fraught years of the war that God would preserve them even 24 Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 78–86; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 378–382. 25 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 383, 395–407; WJE 16:420.

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as he sorely tested them, “loudly and awfully calling on the whole nation to deep humiliation and repentance. . . We han’t reason at all to despair,” he averred, “At the same time that God has thus awfully rebuked us . . . he is . . . inviting us to look to him for help. . .” In the meantime, thirty Mahican men volunteered for militia service, leaving Stockbridge dangerously undefended. Fearing that the small town made a tempting target for French-allied war parties, Edwards wrote in September 1755 to his cousin, Col. Israel Williams, to bring troops to protect the town in fulfillment of a promise made when the Indian residents enlisted to serve. Exigencies forced Williams to refuse the request, and in November 1756 Edwards and other residents directly petitioned the Massachusetts government for a contingent of militia. He found solace in his growing belief that this latest imperial war with France heralded the penultimate clash between the forces of Christ and Antichrist, and that Anglo-America would ultimately prevail and fulfill biblical prophecies of the downfall of Satan’s kingdom, which Protestants at that time knew to be the Roman Catholic Church. Although the Stockbridge residents’ worst fears about the war coming to their doorsteps were never realized, there was little escaping the fact that the town as it had been conceived was in its dying throes, and Edwards began to reconsider his future.26 For all of Edwards’s apparent devotion to his duties at Stockbridge, when the offer of the presidency of the College of New Jersey—later Princeton University —came in the autumn of 1757 following the sudden death of its first president and Edwards’s son-in–law, Aaron Burr, Sr., he only briefly hesitated. Mulling a refusal of the offer, he expressed concerns about his precarious health that resulted in “childish weakness and . . . a disagreeable dullness and stiffness” that he surmised rendered him a poor choice to assume leadership of the college. His other justification for balking was that he had deeply immersed himself in the composition of “A History of the Work of Redemption,” as well as an extended exegetical comparison of the Old and New Testaments. Considering the time and work involved in these projects, as well as the tenuousness of his health, he made it clear that assuming the presidency of the College of New Jersey could not entail the teaching load carried by Burr. He also confessed to not knowing if the governing council of the mission would vote to recommend he accept the offer, but when it did with little deliberation in January 1758, council member Rev. Samuel Hopkins reported that Edwards “appeared uncommonly moved and affected . . . and fell into tears on the occasion. . .” George Marsden, in his magisterial biography of Edwards, noted that the cause for the tears had almost nothing to do with abandoning his Mahican charges. “That he should stay to serve the Indians . . . seems not [to have been] one of his major concerns.”

26 WJE 25:696; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 414–416, 426–427.

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Doubtless he was also relieved that he would no longer have to preside over the inevitable failure of New England’s last praying town.27

3.6

Conclusion

In spite of the setbacks, the conflict with the Williams clan, and his own early prejudices, Edwards’s seven years at Stockbridge fundamentally changed his mind about Indians. Although he clearly favored Christianized Indians over their “pagan” counterparts, he grew in his conviction that all Indian souls deserved God’s grace as much as any white person. He became their champion and defender against Anglo-American exploitation, making no distinction between those Mahicans who accepted Christ and those who refused to do so. Jonathan Edwards’s stature as one of British America’s greatest theologians is unassailable, particularly with regard to his thoughtful championing of evangelical revivalism in the First Great Awakening.28 Throughout most of his career, his thinking about Indians differed relatively little from that of his ministerial colleagues and conformed to Enlightenment-era opinion that—as they were— they remained ni foi, ni roi, ni loi. The crucial exception was that he believed in the potential and necessity for their conversion to Christianity and being assimilated into Anglo-American culture. As a direct result of his experience ministering to and teaching the residents of Stockbridge, his negative opinions moderated substantially to allow for genuine compassion, and not only for those who opted to embrace assimilation, but also for those he once dismissed as hostages to “the grossest ignorance, delusions, and most stupid paganism,” and ended by calling “my people.”29

27 WJE, 16:726; Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1765), 79; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 430–431, quotation on p. 431. 28 Although the bulk of First Great Awakening historiography and Edwards biographical works identify him as a moderate New Light, the evidence shows that he leaned heavily toward countenancing evangelical radicalism with regard to certain varieties of visionary experiences and emotional fervor. See Smith, The First Great Awakening, 152–153, 159–160. 29 WJE 3:151; WJE 16:610.

Gideon Mailer (University of Minnesota Duluth)

“Freedom from spiritual slavery, but from civil too” Jonathan Edwards, the Scottish Enlightenment, and American Slavery

4.1

Introduction

Throughout his life Jonathan Edwards opposed perceived Enlightenment influences among Protestant ministers on both sides of the Atlantic. He accused educated clergymen of promoting human-centered “Arminian” moral ideas.1 But in 1741, Edwards supported an Arminian-leaning slaveholder, Benjamin Doolittle, against congregants who were broadly revivalist in their approach to piety and congregational life. Edwards defended the local minister, who faced opposition from a congregation that, among other things, accused him of immorality due to slaveholding. Supporting Doolittle against his Northfield congregants, Edwards drafted a defense of slaveholding in the region, while remaining opposed to the international slave trade, in a letter to the Hampshire County Ministerial Association.2 Notwithstanding his support for a minister who espoused a relatively sunny vision of human moral capability, in most of his writings and public statements during the following decade Edwards reasserted the centrality of human depravity and the necessity of evangelical revivalism.3 Posthumously, moreover, his encouragement of transatlantic revivalism influenced the anti-slavery stance of 1 On Edwards’s philosophical and theological opposition against Arminianism, see for example, James A. Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 108–131. 2 On Edwards’s association with slavery in this example, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 35; Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740– 1865,” Journal of American History 92 (June 2005): 49–50. 3 For a recent account of the continuation of evangelical philosophy until Edwards’s death, including its debt to early modern erudition and philosophical terminology, see Douglas A. Sweeney, Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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some ‘immediatist’ members of the New Divinity movement, who focused on the mutuality of sin and the necessity of moral regeneration across geographical and ethno-racial lines.4 Yet, through the 1780s and after, several other prominent New Divinity thinkers were suspected of Arminianism, due to their incorporation of Enlightenment moral sensory terminology in their more tempered and “gradualist” opposition to slavery.”5 What are we to make of these theological and philosophical tensions, and their association with pro-slavery, gradualist, or anti-slavery ideology, in Edwards’s circle and among those whom Edwards directly influenced? Tracing the broader meaning, context, and legacy of the tension between God-centered revivalism and human-centered Enlightenment moral philosophy illuminates and expands important work by Kenneth Minkema, Harry Stout, Douglas Sweeney and other scholars, which has established Edwards’s ambiguous response to slavery. Doing so also allows us to understand Edwards’s equally ambiguous legacy in a New Divinity movement that often espoused revivalist and anti-slavery ideas through the 1780s, yet which has been described as “Janus-faced” in its evolving tension between Enlightenment apologetics and an Augustinian emphasis on universal sin during the following decades.6 From the late-1730s, Edwards engaged with Enlightenment thought, particularly Scottish moral sense philosophy inspired by Francis Hutcheson. Yet from the early 1740s, he also began a lifelong correspondence with Scottish Presbyterian evangelicals, who often opposed Hutchesonian moral philosophy. These associations with Scottish intellectual and theological culture provide a key lens to understand Edwards’s ambiguous response to American slavery, and his similarly ambiguous legacy among anti-slavery and gradualist New Divinity theologians, in three related ways. Firstly, Edwards’s encounter with Hutchesonian philosophy, and with the Scottish Presbyterian evangelicalism that questioned its ethical tenets, contributed to his evolving articulation of concepts such as ‘slavery’ and ‘liberty’ in civil and spiritual terms. Though he usually avoided linking those concepts more specifically to the enslavement of Africans in America, his conception of white 4 Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,” 50– 61. 5 Nathanial Taylor, for example, “by dropping the notion of human inability from his theology, represented a more decisive break from traditional Calvinism than earlier New Divinity authors such as Bellamy, Hopkins, or Emmons.” See Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: University Press, 2017), 607. On Taylorite moderation in theology and in opposition to slavery, see Douglas A. Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63. 6 Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, Oxford University Press, 2003), 136; Hopkins, 78.

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Protestant individual freedom as essentially trans-national undermined those who sought to root it in the special moral privileges of any one province, region, or nation – such as the “stadial” thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.7 Critiquing the notion of privileged moral development in particular provinces became central to Edwards’s effort to create a transatlantic “Concert for Prayer” in association with Scottish evangelicals – even as he continued to borrow moral sensory vocabularies from Enlightenment writers to define the necessary steps towards conversion and salvation.8 In his correspondence with evangelical Scots, Edwards shared their desire to protect ministerial authority against the claims of over-reaching ecclesiastical bodies. But he also shared their apprehension that congregations might become overly confident in their moral capacity, undermining ministerial guidance, and preventing their true revival and regeneration as mutual sinners in the Atlantic World. These correspondences will highlight important confessional concerns that superseded any anxieties that Edwards may have experienced regarding Rev. Doolittle’s Arminianism, thereby helping us to understand his earlier support for the minister. Secondly, Edwards’s evangelical opposition to the notion of privileged societal development formulated a key intellectual and theological conception that would contribute to the Edwardsean legacy in the transatlantic abolitionism of several New Divinity ministers, as well as a few nineteenth-century abolitionists. Many were influenced by the revivalist notion of universal sin, and the necessity of mutual salvation, in their opposition to American slavery. Yet, thirdly, other members of the New Divinity movement, and a later generation of abolitionists, were also introduced to Scottish Enlightenment authors such as Hutcheson through their reading of Edwards’s published works. Edwards, like his Scottish evangelical correspondents, had continued to employ Hutchesonian terminology to describe the sensory state of witnessing divine 7 On the development of Scottish Enlightenment conceptions of “stadial” societal development, which allowed the subjects in certain provinces or nations (such as Scotland, or at least Britain) to be defined as more advanced – and even free – in their development, see Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 7–9, 55–59. 8 On Edwards’s Concert of Prayer, and its repudiation of the notion that any one province or nation enjoyed special developmental status over another, from a moral perspective, see Edwards, An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer: For the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, Pursuant to Scripture-Promises and Prophecies concerning the Last Time (Boston, 1747), iii (preface), 92; Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 110–116; Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 67–68; Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 228–231.

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grace, even if he did not share Hutcheson’s human-centered ethical conclusions. But at the turn of the nineteenth century some ministers and teachers did more than deploy moral sensory vocabularies towards evangelical ends as they considered the problem of American slavery. Their encounter with Hutchesonian terminology in Edwards’s writings underlay their incorporation of moral sensory ethical tenets, including the notion of universal benevolence. They employed those tenets in their tempered opposition to slaveholding – even while other Americans became comfortable employing the same Enlightenment ethical systems to support the institution of slavery.

4.2

Spiritual Liberty and Civil Slavery

From as early as thirteen years old, as a Yale undergraduate, Jonathan Edwards alluded to ‘slavery’ as a state which followed the failure of individuals to transcend their subjective passions and egoism in favor of divine grace. It derived from a propensity to assume the reliability of individual moral perception without considering the latter’s debt to divine providence. In a letter to Deacon Moses Lyman, Edwards criticized those who held “no hope that God in his providence would ever appear for their help” and suggested that they were guilty of excess fatalism. It became “a great sin, for men, by their, own act, to make themselves miserable. As, for instance, if a man were in a miserable captivity under severe taskmasters, and esteemed his bondage worse than death, and had no prospect of deliverance, it would not be lawful in such a case for a man to kill himself, to free himself from slavery.” To assume anything of divine providence – including a lack of mercy in response to universal sin – negated God’s unpredictable nature and indulged individual moral perception. Such an assumption, according to Edwards, was as unethical as the belief that individuals retained some choice in the decision to end their lives to escape civil forms of slavery.9 The use of the slavery motif to describe a failure to acknowledge the intervention of divine providence often appeared in earlier Puritan sermons. But as Minkema has suggested, Edwards’s “presence in a slave-trading center” such as New York during the early 1720s “may have given them [Puritan slavery motifs] new meaning for him.” This new meaning was apparent in Edwards’s sermon on Christian Liberty (1720). In the first sentence, Edwards described the Messiah as proclaiming, “a universal liberty to all servants, slaves, captives, vassals, [and] imprisoned [or] condemned persons,” before eventually removing the word 9 WJE 16: 253–254.

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“slaves” in its final draft. It is likely that Edwards removed that word due to its increasingly binary racial association in North America. The other terms, conversely, defined the lack of freedom in more abstract ways.10 Having avoided the potential racial connotations of slavery in the sermon’s first section on civil freedom, Edwards returned to the spiritual definition of slavery: “Without doubt, when once persons are become the sons of God they are no longer slaves: slaves, prisoners and captives are not consistent with such a relation to God. Another reason why they cannot be in bondage is because they are the friends of Jesus Christ…Nor does it hinder our liberty at all that we are bound by a law; for the end of this law is to redeem us from servitude and bondage, and to instate us in a perfect law of liberty, and therefore this law in our text is called the law of liberty… The servant of God is delivered from the tormenting galls of conscience which wicked men are in bondage under.”11 Given Edwards’s suggestion that the messianic era had not yet begun, he implied that the others forms of servitude were not entirely problematic in the present moral state of mankind. In the present era, they remained distinct from the spiritual state of slavery, which required immediate emancipation through grace. Edwards maintained the distinction between spiritual and civil slavery in the pre-messianic era in other sermons and writings over the next two decades. He avoided the ambiguity that had appeared in the early section of the first draft of “Christian Liberty.” In “None Are Saved by Their Own Righteousness” (1720), Edwards suggested that God prevented “slavery” by allowing individuals “to make sensible of their miserable condition, of the great need they stand in of a savior…to give up themselves to God.” The Holy Spirit supplied grace that allowed individuals to acknowledge their need for external support, and “hereby God redeems them from bondage unto sin and captivity by Satan. He sets them at liberty from their cruel slavery, and gives them the liberty of the sons of God” – even while they began as sinners like any other human.12 In True Nobleness of Mind (1720) Edwards claimed that “to be a Christian is to be of a noble mind, in that Christianity delivers men from slavery to their passions. They are inferior servile minds that are most under the government of their passions, that are slaves to those worst of masters. Our passions were given us to be our servants, and not our masters. Carnal men are so mean-spirited as voluntarily to become servants to what were given to be their servants. The Christian delivers himself from this mean slavery, asserts his own liberty and the dominion that is his right; he obtains victory over the passion of anger.”13 Additionally, in 10 11 12 13

Minkema, “Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 41; WJE 10: 627–628. WJE 10:622–624. WJE 14:334–335. WJE 14:236.

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his Wicked Men’s Slavery to Sin (1720) Edwards warned the unregenerate of their enslavement to temporal desires: “…you serve sin, you serve a master that is vastly beneath yourself, and make yourself a slave to that which is not worthy of anything but loathing and detestation…14 Trapped in corrupt human time, individuals were cannibalized by the very passions that they themselves sought to consume. They could only be saved by the light of faith, supplied to them by grace, which enabled them to transcend human time.15 By the 1730s, in public and private writings, Edwards increasingly considered the link between civil liberty and spiritual freedom, without directly discussing the enslavement of Africans in the Atlantic world. Rather, he began his lifelong attempt to articulate the association between provincial imperial life and the freedom to encourage Protestant revivalism. Distance from political engagement in civic centers such as London, in Edwards’s estimation, provided a space in which outlying churches could minister the individual salvation experience of congregants, without the problematic mediating role of centralizing confessional establishments. Provincial individuals, according to Edwards, were freer to acknowledge their sin on their own terms, and to experience the process of salvation and regeneration.16 In his extended exegesis on the Book of Revelation (also known as his “Notes on the Apocalypse”) begun during his early theological career in the 1730s, Edwards thus suggested that the concept of “liberty” could be defined according to the presence of civil freedom in the present world rather than solely as a product of spiritual salvation in the next life. According to Edwards, “the absolute and despotic power of the kings of the earth shall be taken away, and liberty shall reign throughout the earth.” He continued, “every nation shall be a free people, not only with a freedom from spiritual slavery, but from civil too, from the tyrannical and absolute power of men.” Edwards’s view that spiritual freedom was contingent on the civil freedom of provincial imperial people contributed to a developing notion of white Protestant liberty in the colonial world.17 In “Notes on Imputation and Free Grace,” which was possibly written in 1734 as a collection of memoranda for Justification by Faith Alone, Edwards had 14 WJE 14:337, 347–350. 15 According to Kimnach, the sermon evoked the “child-like sinner who seeks a feast only to become one.” See WJE 14:337. 16 On provincial evangelical freedom in Edwards’s theological milieu, shifting New England covenanting ideology towards a broader understanding of the reconverted individual and their relationship with God, irrespective of region or local covenant, see Noll, America’s God, 45; Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in EighteenthCentury Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999), 34, 38, 130; Landsman, Colonials to Provincials, 113. 17 See WJE 5. On this passage, see also Gerald R. McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park: Penn State Press, 1992), 75.

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included an extended slavery motif as he sought to distinguish “Christ’s righteousness” from the “imperfections of our obedience” that Arminians purportedly denied. Christ, in Edwards’s analysis, “only sets us free from hell, and leaves us to purchase heaven for ourselves. So that he don’t properly purchase heaven for us in any respect, as he that only pays a price to deliver another from slavery can’t be said to purchase an estate for him too, merely because thenceforward he has opportunity to work for himself… so by the price of his own hard labor to purchase an estate for himself.”18 In his “Misrepresentations corrected, and truth vindicated” (1743), Edwards further summarized his ongoing opposition against human-centered moral reasoning, in a critique of Rev. Mr. Solomon Williams’s book, The true state of the question concerning the qualifications necessary to lawful communion in the Christian sacraments. Failure to devolve individual moral perception to “the service of God as their one only master,” according to Edwards, placed individuals “in a state of slavery to sin” that opposed all the means of “deliverance & salvation” such as the “offers of Grace the Allurements & Invitations of the Gospel and the Great saviour of the world…” They failed to “accept of deliverance from a slavery” they were “willingly held in and they strove “against the Liberty of the sons of God, and labour to find out all manner of difficulties & Hindrances in the way of it” thanks to their obtuse human-centered ethical assertions.19 These statements, including Edwards’s claim in his “Apocalypse Series” that civil liberty was “not understood only in a mystical and spiritual sense,” and that it was threatened by the promotion of Arminian sentiments, preceded ostensibly similar statements among a later generation of evangelical Protestant abolitionists in the Atlantic world. From the late eighteenth century, they claimed that spiritual salvation after death was contingent on the prior abolition of civil slavery, among other sinful societal constructs, during earthly time; a demonstration that individuals had acknowledged their worldly sin as a precursor to the reception of divine grace, and thus spiritual emancipation in the world to come.20 But like many other white Protestant thinkers during his lifetime, Edwards’s link between spiritual and civil freedom – a connection between two temporal worlds – failed to manifest in any concerted opposition to the enslavement of 18 See WJE 37. 19 WJEO 33: 94. 20 WJE 5:136–137. For the late-eighteenth-century evangelical Calvinist desire to remove constraints on civil freedom – including slavery – as a precursor to the removal of spiritual constraints through revival and regeneration, see Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 39–54; Anne C. Loveland, “Evangelicalism and ”Immediate Emancipation” in American Antislavery Thought,” The Journal of Southern History Vol. 32, No. 2 (May, 1966): 172–188.

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Africans by white subjects in the British imperial realm. With his ire squared firmly against Arminian theorists, he deferred to existing hierarchical systems in his provincial sphere, including those that incorporated racial slavery.21 Edwards had noted in A Faithful Narrative that “several Negroes . . . appear to have been truly born again in the late remarkable season.”22 He baptized people of color and admitted them to full membership in his Northampton congregation.23 As Burns has suggested, the title of an unpublished sermon by Edwards alluded to the minister’s potential to collapse universalist definitions of spiritual liberty into discussions of civil freedom for Native Americans, and even enslaved Africans: “All Mankind of All Nations, White and Black, Young and Old, Is Going in One or the Other of These Paths, Either in the Way That Leads to Life or the Way That Leads to Destruction” was delivered to Native Americans at Stockbridge, but “his concern to mention “white and black” suggests that evangelism of AfricanAmericans was a possible consideration for him.”24 In his History of the Work of Redemption, Edwards foresaw a post-millennial era when “many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines,” and when “excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Turkey.” But before that point, the civil enslavement of humans remained “part of the fallen world’s order.”25 In his life, therefore, Edwards purchased an enslaved African in Newport, Rhode Island, a fourteen-year-old girl named Venus. Later, he bought a “Negro boy named Titus.”26 Moreover, he demonstrated a distinction between his rela21 According to Marsden, “Eighteenth century Britons viewed their world as…controlled by hierarchies of relationships…[including] Women, children, hired servants, indentures and African slaves were all dependent on persons directly above them… In this arrangement paternalism was a virtue, not a term of opprobrium. Although British people spoke much of “liberty,” few had personal freedom in a modern sense.” And so “the world into which Edwards was born will make a lot more sense if we think of it as British rather than American…Edwards lived in a thoroughly pre-Revolutionary British Empire.” George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 2. On Edwards’s paternalistic suggestion that the state of enslavement might me ameliorated by good treatment by masters, see Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate,” 50. 22 Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative (circa 1737), in Edwards, The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen, in Perry Miller et al., eds., WJE, IV (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 159; Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (Oct. 1997): 829; McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society, 65, 163–64. 23 Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 34. 24 Sherard Burns, “Trusting the Theology of a Slave-owner,” 159. See also The Blessing of God: Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Michael D. McMullen (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 225–230. 25 WJE 9:480; Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” 828. 26 Edwards “owned several slaves: Joseph and Lee, a woman named Venus, purchased in 1731, and, listed in the inventory of his estate in 1758, a ”negro boy” named Titus.” See Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” 825.

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tively radical approach to Native American rights, and his more conservative approach to the enslavement of Africans.27 To our contemporary eyes, enslavement of Africans in North America may seem like the most glaring instance of civil unfreedom during Edwards’ life – a temporal constraint that distinguished individuals from each other and prevented the mutual acknowledgement of universal sin, a central precept of the evangelical Protestant movement that Edwards helped to engender.28 These tensions are revealed by Edward’s only direct written engagement with American slavery, in the “Draft Letter on Slavery” that he composed in 1741. After Rev. Benjamin Doolittle’s congregation opposed his ministry for several reasons, including slaveholding, the Hampshire Association of pastors suggested external mediation and asked Edwards to consider the case against Doolittle. In his long “Draft Letter,” which supported Doolittle in his position, Edwards censured supporters of the international slave trade. The trade, in his view, prevented the spread of evangelicalism to free African populations, who risked becoming alienated by an association between Euro-American slavers and the Christian Gospel to which they supposedly adhered.29 But Edwards also formulated a byzantine argument in favor of the right to maintain the enslavement of Africans who had arrived in the American colonies with such a civil status.30 The provincial liberty that enabled dissenting Protestants to promote revivalism across regional boundaries – including in Africa – also allowed them a degree of legal autonomy to hold people who had already arrived in the Americas with an enslaved status. Edwards’s account of jurisdictional freedom suggested the autonomy of regional communities to make laws according to local precedents – including those that allowed individuals to keep enslaved people, provided they were not treated too brutally.31 27 In his encounter with Native Americans at Stockbridge, according to some scholars, Edwards developed a more universal, even equalizing, approach to race and ethnicity, albeit inchoate. See Rachel Wheeler, “‘Friends to Your Souls’: Jonathan Edwards’ Indian Pastorate and the Doctrine of Original Sin,” Church History 72 (Dec. 2003): 736–65; Michael James McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 527. 28 On other aspects of Edwards’ failure to support racial equality in Northampton, such as the segregation of enslaved people in certain demarcated areas of the church, and his problematic discussion of intellectual differences between ethnicities, see Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 35; Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,” 49–50. 29 See Kenneth P. Minkema, ”Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly LIV (Oct. 1997), 823–34. 30 Minkema, “Edwards’s Defense,” 32–8. 31 Edwards reflected a common view of the imperial British constitution, which allowed local freedoms without suggesting universal liberty, and which allowed regional elites to define freedom from metropolitan authority according to their own ability to perpetuate existing

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As well as criticizing his slaveholding, the “disaffected brethren” who opposed Rev. Doolittle accused him of promoting Arminian tenets at the expense of evangelical revivalism.32 In supporting Doolittle, then, Edwards missed a prime opportunity to attack human-centered ethical sensibility –the central concern in his religious and intellectual life, including as it related to his definition of provincial evangelical freedom.33 Edwards, according to Burns, was driven “by a dual reality—namely, that he owned slaves and knowing that a threat to the slaveholding of any one minister was a threat to the slaveholding of any minister.” And so, he “dismissed theological differences and defended Doolittle, the Arminian.”34 A constraining pragmatism in Edwards’s thought process is therefore apparent. The potential for an emancipatory influence in Protestant evangelicalism, which became evident among subsequent generations of Abolitionists, gave way to the logistics of hierarchical society and the unthinking assumptions of eighteenth-century power relations, which governed Edwards in his approach to slavery. To oppose slaveholding in 1741 would have risked destabilizing the legitimacy of unquestioned hierarchical authority more generally, including clerical power.35

4.3

Slavery and Edwards’s Scottish Correspondence

Edwards’s entry into the Doolittle affair reflected his privilege as a figurehead who was motivated by a concern for theological intricacies, or by tacit support for white hierarchical frameworks, rather than by any immediate concern for the experience of enslaved people. So far, we have suggested that Edwards’s attention to theological matters in the affair turned on his desire to assure the importance of ministerial authority, notwithstanding his wish to encourage an individual

32 33 34 35

hierarchies, including those incorporating enslaved people. On these provincial freedoms in the Edwardsean and Presbyterian-Congregational context, see Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 2; Ned C. Landsman, “The Provinces and the Empire: Scotland, the American Colonies, and the Development of British Provincial Identity,” in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 273–274. For an account of this context in the town, see Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 256. WJE 16:71–76. Sherard Burns, “Trusting the Theology of a Slave Owner,” in A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 147, 149. As Stout and Minkema have summarized, perhaps “Edwards saw no contradiction between ‘winking’ at domestic slavery but not winking at the slave trade,” because having “never witnessed the ultimate brutalities of the institution, and clean in their conscience that they witnessed and preached to their slaves, they were at peace with it…” – at ease with domestic slaves as long as they “tutored them in the truths of Christianity.” See Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,” 50.

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salvation experience among congregants. Supporting clerical power, we have suggested, superseded the contiguous opportunity to oppose an Arminian theorist. Yet Edwards’s support for Doolittle as a slaveholder, and his opposition to the international slave trade, can be reconciled with his evangelicalism to a greater extent than such a narrative would suggest. We can make this point by examining Edwards’s growing association with Scottish evangelicals in the decade following the Doolittle controversy. In his Scottish correspondences, Edwards tended to define the notion of ‘liberty’ according to the unimpeded ability to fulfil duty to divine moral authority.36 Though he avoided any broader discussion of the term in relation to American slavery, Edwards’s motivation to reach out to Scottish evangelicals in the years after his “Draft Letter” allows us to understand the document in a new light; providing another layer of explanation for its seemingly contradictory support for American slaveholding alongside opposition to the external slave-trade. Edwards engaged with ministers such as John Erskine, who positioned themselves in opposition to what they viewed as the Arminian moral philosophy of the dominant “Moderate” faction of the Church of Scotland – a faction that has subsequently been described as central to the cultivation and proliferation of Scottish Enlightenment thought. Erskine and his colleagues drew a contrast between religious revivalism and the parochialism that they perceived among their adversaries.37 They accused them of using patronage to buttress the civic authority of their members, their latitudinarian ideals, and the notion that Scotland’s role in the British mainland was somehow superior in its cultural and moral development – all of which made them unlikely to contribute to any broader extraterritorial movement of religious revivalism.38 Edwards’s disappointment in the Congregational religious culture of New England was rooted in developments that preceded his relationship with the evangelical wing of the Church of Scotland. Nonetheless, his developing unease with public covenanting identity was strengthened by his dialogue with Scottish opponents of parochial ‘Moderate’ religion. He increasingly warned that locally or regionally defined moral norms risked obscuring the importance of a personal salvation experience, which applied to all beings, irrespective of regional bor-

36 WJE 16:707–709. 37 Jonathan M. Yeager, Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 38 On this critique of parochial Moderate identity see David Allan, ”Protestantism, Presbyterianism, and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish History,” in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650-c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182–206.

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ders.39 In his 1747 “Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People,” most famously, Edwards outlined such a vision in his transatlantic Concert for Prayer between Scotland and New England.40 These developments were prefigured – and arguably influenced – by Edwards’s thinking during the earlier Doolittle controversy. At a time when he had begun to question Scottish Enlightenment theories that privileged the moral and civic capacity of one region over another, Edwards had used his “Draft Letter on Slavery” to universalize the notion of Christian neighborliness, in order to transcend regional and national boundaries. Portending his opposition to elect nation ideology during the later-1740s, Edwards recommended broadening the notion of neighbor to include all those who had the potential for salvation, irrespective of regional boundaries. If they associated Euro-Americans with their potential civil enslavement, Edwards suggested in his “Draft Letter,” Africans would become less likely to view European-descended people as neighbors who lived according to “the moral law, which Christians were obliged to follow regardless of where they lived.”41 They would be stoked into feeling that they were in “a state of war with all nations.” To “disfranchise all the nations of Africa” by assuming any “sui juris” free Africans could be sold into slavery was “abominable to all Christians” because it prevented the spread of the Gospel across regional boundaries.42 Yet in his “Draft Letter” Edwards also warned of the “liberty to disfranchise whole nations” by threatening regional legal frameworks that sanctioned slavery.43 As Minkema has astutely noted, Edwards “used the word ‘disfranchise’ to describe the practice, by which he meant depriving individuals of the freedom, rights, and privileges they enjoyed in their native country.”44 Such privileges can 39 For these associations, see Yeager, Enlightened Evangelicalism, 11–15, 20–26; G. D. Henderson, “Jonathan Edwards and Scotland,” in The Burning Bush: Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: St. Andrews’ Press, 1957), 151–162. On Edwards’s critique of public covenanting sentiment, see Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy, 24–28, 129–135. 40 Edwards, An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer: For the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, Pursuant to Scripture-Promises and Prophecies concerning the Last Time (Boston, 1747), iii (preface), 92. See also Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials, 110–116; Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, 67–68; Noll, America’s God, 45; Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy, 34, 38, 130. 41 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” 828. On Edwards’s denial that America would be the source of the millennium see McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society, 60–63, 82–87. 42 Jonathan Edwards, “Draft Letter on Slavery,” 76. On this passage see also Richard A. Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (New York, Oxford University Press, 2011), 120–121. 43 Jonathan Edwards, “Draft Letter on Slavery,” 73. 44 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” 827.

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be understood in light of Edwards’s subsequent articulation of provincial freedom in conversation with Scotsmen like Erskine: a respect for legal precedents in semi-autonomous outlying communities, including those that governed the freedom to promote transnational tenets of evangelical revivalism. On the one hand, Edwards shared the Scottish evangelical desire to repudiate parochial assumptions about the privileged moral sensibility of one region over another, lest such an idea lead them to ignore the universal nature of human depravity and the necessity of global regeneration. On the other hand, the freedom to transcend provincial religious boundaries was thought to be contingent on the protection of distinctly local legal frameworks, within which Dissenting churches could minister their congregations as they saw fit. Edwards partnered with evangelical Scots in promoting the distinct legal and constitutional autonomies of various regions and provinces in the British Atlantic realm – including those that protected the rights of ministers either from the whims of their congregants or the machinations of supra-local ecclesiastic bodies.45 The potentially tense interplay between outward-looking evangelicalism and a desire to maintain the legal autonomies of regional populations led to much ambiguity among Scottish evangelicals by the mid-eighteenth century, including in relation to slavery. As demonstrated in the case of John Witherspoon, leader of the Popular Party evangelical faction of the Church of Scotland, the promotion of revivalism and rebirth among enslaved and free imperial British subjects did not require the repudiation of local legal statutes that distinguished between civil freedom and spiritual emancipation. James Montgomery was eventually baptized by Witherspoon in 1756, but his civil status as an enslaved person remained far more ambiguous in Witherspoon’s estimation. Though Witherspoon opposed Arminian sentiments among his Enlightened Scottish adversaries, his desire to maintain the jurisdictional autonomy of evangelical ministers initially led him to support the legal institutions that were thought to protect that ministerial independence, including in their potential support for the continued civil enslavement of runaway slaves such as Montgomery.46 Using similar reasoning in the previous decade, Edwards felt comfortable opposing the slave trade and criticizing North American slaveholders as enabling 45 These associations were particularly apparent in a letter between Jonathan Edwards and the Reverend Thomas Gillespie, in 1752, discussing the problems faced by ministers who were unable to assure the salvation of their congregants, but who also suffered at the hands of ecclesiastical bodies that usurped their local authority. WJE 16:545–546; Wilson H. Kimnach, “‘Unfearing Minds’: A Transatlantic Brotherhood of Preachers,” in Kelly Van Andel, Adriaan C. Neele, and Kenneth P. Minkema, eds., Jonathan Edwards and Scotland (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2011), 9. 46 See Simon P. Newman, “Rethinking Runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain, the Caribbean, West Africa and North America,” Slavery & Abolition (2016), 9.

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it, while also supporting the continuation of servitude for those who had always been enslaved within North American legal frameworks, including those that been influenced by religious law. As he demonstrated in his response to the Doolittle case, the independence of ministerial authority from public moral claims was in his view a key determinant of provincial freedom. Regional legal precedents allowed ministers to remain free from centralizing religious establishments, but also the moral whims of the day. Edwards sought to avoid threatening that authority by unsettling other legal precedents, including the legality of slaveholding as established in local common law. Aside from the issue of continued jurisdictional autonomy, Edwards’s intervention in the Doolittle controversy also reinforced other aspects of his evangelical worldview. Edwards was certainly influenced by his conservative context, which valued social hierarchy more than the emancipation of enslaved people. But we can add to this key insight by pointing out that in Edwards’s view, the selfrighteousness of Doolittle’s revivalist opponents was ironically rather too close to those Arminians who emphasized their cultivated sensibility over the universal necessity of regeneration. From his subsequent engagement with Scottish evangelical ministers, we know that Edwards shared their conviction that trained clergymen ought to verify the personal experience of piety among individual congregants.47 Though Edwards criticized the mediating distraction of Arminian clergymen, he also warned against excess moral certainty among congregants, including those who espoused ostensibly evangelical ideals and who considered themselves reborn. Tensions and ambiguities regarding the nature of true virtue were always likely to accompany the path toward a true moral experience, wrought by the grace of God. As part of their personal struggle, therefore, Edwards and his Scottish correspondents challenged individuals to ask themselves whether their piety in fact derived from an egotistical desire for public esteem. Many of his works, such as Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1742), Some Thoughts concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1743), and Religious Affections (1746) reminded congregants that ministers were required to verify their salvation experience. They were published in many editions in Scotland, almost immediately after their publication on the western side of the Atlantic. Edwards likely had his Scottish audience in mind, at least in part, when writing the works.48

47 See Christopher W. Mitchell, “Jonathan Edwards’s Scottish Connection,” in David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds., Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2003), 223, 231–234. On the ambiguity over the issue of ministerial assurance, see Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy, 105–106, 124–128. 48 Mitchell, “Jonathan Edwards’s Scottish Connection,” 223, 231–234.

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One of Edwards’s most prolific correspondents was Rev. Thomas Gillespie, minister at Carnock, Scotland. In 1752, after Gillespie was removed from his pastoral position by a regional ecclesiastical body, he and Edwards wrote to each other and suggested that such a deposition represented an affront to provincial religious liberty. Edwards wondered to his friend, “that such a church, at this time of day, after the cause of liberty in matters of conscience has been so abundantly defended, should arrogate to herself such a kind of authority over the consciences of both ministers and people, and use it in such a manner, by such severity to establish that which is not only so contrary to that liberty of Christians wherewith Christ has made them free, but so directly contrary to her own professed principles, acts and resolutions entered on public record.” Assessing the roots of such degradation in theological developments over the previous decade, Edwards suggested that there was likely “something else at the bottom, besides a zeal to uphold the authority of the church [versus local ministers]. Perhaps many of the clergy of the Church of Scotland have their minds secretly infected with those lax principles of the new divinity, and have imbibed the generous doctrines (as they are accounted) which are so much in vogue at the present day, and so contrary to the strict, mysterious, spiritual, soul-humbling principles of our forefathers.” Edwards noted a similar phenomenon in New England, where “the power of experimental godliness” was “tainted” by those who seemed “to be such great advocates for liberty and freedom of thought, and condemn a narrow and persecuting spirit…yet in the course of things have made it manifest that they themselves had no small share of a persecuting spirit…”49 But Edwards could just as easily demonstrate unease regarding the excess moral confidence of congregants. As they came close to generating a moral consensus, they risked privileging the certainty of group thinking, which was antithetical to the personal nature of sin, the acknowledgment of individual egoism, and the necessity of revival. Those who defined their moral stance in opposition to slave-holding, Edwards suggested, risked privileging their ethical sensibility, acting with self-righteousness. Even if enslaving other humans was always sinful (about which Edwards was ambiguous), and even if Doolittle was accused of Arminianism (which Edwards was never usually afraid to condemn), revivalist congregants risked eschewing their ongoing sin and pride in their righteous denunciation of Doolittle. If Doolittle was indeed an Arminian, after all, who could be sure that his congregants had verified their purported regeneration as evangelicals? We can compare with another northern minister, from a later era, who shared aspects of Edwards’s desire to reconcile the empirical methods of moral sense and common-sense philosophy without giving up a Calvinistic account of the 49 WJE 16:545–546; Kimnach, “’Unfearing Minds,” 9.

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necessity of conversion. During his fifty years as president of Princeton Theological Seminary, (1829–1878), Charles Hodge condemned Abolitionists not because he was overtly pro-slavery, but because he maintained an abstract theological concern for white congregants: the problematic ethical implications of their Abolitionist moral certainty. Like Edwards, Hodge directly opposed Arminian moral epistemologies by adopting an orthodox Calvinist standpoint, yet also found himself questioning the stance of evangelical Protestant congregations whose opposition to slavery led them to proclaim the moral righteousness of their ethical perception; bringing them rather closer to humancentered moral philosophy than they might have realized. Hodge, as with Edwards, was by no means a vocal supporter of enslaved labor. Nonetheless, he was concerned that white Protestants used the antislavery movement to define their inner moral authority, irrespective of their state of regeneration.50 Edwards, like Hodge, warned that anti-slavery activists risked overlooking their complicity in slavery, as people who lived in societies that benefited from the institution; and who eschewed their own continued sin and egoism. Thus, he concerned himself with the hypocrisy of those who opposed slavery, rather than having to examine the moral nature of his own position on the institution, or indeed the experiences of actual enslaved people.

4.4

Freedom of the Will, New Divinity, and Slavery

Edwards’s critical engagement with Scottish theology and philosophy from the early 1740s contributed to his discussion of liberty and freedom in a transatlantic spiritual context. It helps us to understand how his writings could herald an antislavery legacy, at least in some circles, even while they avoided direct reference to civil enslavement during his lifetime, and even as they followed his support for the legality of slaveholding in Connecticut. According to Edwards’s early biographer, Sereno Dwight, “an epistolary correspondence was commenced between Mr. Edwards and the Rev. John Erskine,” that continued for a decade until Edwards’s death, and which contributed to his thinking in his treatise on The Freedom of the Will (1754). Having written a first letter to Erskine in 1747, Edwards outlined his desire to build on work in his recently published Treatise Concerning Religious Affections: “I have thought of writing something particularly and largely on the Arminian controversy, in 50 See Hodge’s reasoning in, for example, Charles Hodge, review of Slavery, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1845), Biblical Repertory and Theological Review,VIII (1836), 279; [Hodge], “review essay on abolitionism,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review . . . , XVI (1844), 546–547. See also Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture, 157–161.

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distinct discourses on the various points in dispute, to be published successively, beginning first with a discourse concerning the freedom of the will, and moral agency; endeavoring fully and thoroughly to state and discuss those points of liberty and necessity, moral and physical inability, efficacious grace, and the ground of virtue and vice, reward and punishment, blame and praise, with regard to the dispositions and actions of reasonable creatures.” By opposing the notion of innate morality, Edwards signaled to Erskine that “freedom” and “liberty” were contingent on the state of an individual’s regeneration in human time. Writing to Erskine in Scotland in July 1752, Edwards hoped to circulate his Godcentered account of the human ethical will, and the “Arminian controversy,” among “other friends in Scotland.” Erskine sent Edwards material pertaining to “the more considerable Arminian divines,” and as Ramsey notes, Edwards delayed publication of his Freedom of the Will until 1754, so that he could generate a pool of subscribers in Scotland.51 In the published treatise, Edwards adopted the motif of enslavement to suggest that “a man may be in miserable slavery and bondage to a strong habit. But it may be comparatively easy to make an alteration with respect to such future acts, as are only occasional and transient; because the occasion or transient cause, if foreseen, may often easily be prevented or avoided…” His argument responded to British Arminians such as Daniel Whitby, who had claimed that it was appropriate to repudiate the notion of divine prescience to rescue the potential of individual liberty. Edwards, conversely, argued that individuals were free to emancipate themselves from immoral habits, but that their ability to discern ethical acts was indeed predetermined by God, who placed such knowledge within them as an act of grace.52 Edwards’s critique of Arminianism in Freedom of the Will represented the culmination of his intellectual development, which had been aided by his Scottish correspondence. Edwards situated humans in a redemptive vision of history, allowing them to transcend spiritual slavery by removing the temporal impediments that prevented their reception of grace. Individuals had agency to change the temporal universe, even as their moral will had been implanted by God, aligning them with his will outside human time.53 Such a philosophical trajectory 51 Sereno E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, in The Works of President Edwards, 10 vols. (New York, 1829), 1:250–251, 270. This association with Erskine, and Edwards’s discussion of Arminianism, is highlighted in Ramsey’s “Introduction to Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will,” in WJE 1:2, 6–8. For Edwards’s statements see Jonathan Edwards to John Erskine, [Summer?] 1747. Described and briefly excerpted in Sir Henry Moncrieff Wellwood, Account of the Life and Writings of John Erskine, D.D. (Edinburgh, 1818), 196–201; WJE. 16:249; Dwight, The Life of President Edwards 1:270, 405–406; WJE 16:265; 348. 52 WJE 1:161. 53 McClymond and McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 36–37.

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ought to have allowed Edwards to question the legitimacy of racial slavery as one of many impediments to the regeneration of individuals, irrespective of culture or national boundary. Yet as we have noted, Edwards was careful not to repudiate local provincial precedents that maintained ministerial power in relation to local congregants or regional ecclesiastical bodies. In his attention to local precedent, Edwards buoyed legal statutes that buttressed the enslavement of Africans by ministers, just as some Scottish evangelicals would do the same during the 1750s. In supporting slavery in existing provinces of the British imperial world while opposing the slave trade, and in developing a vocabulary to describe the transnational nature of sin, Edwards can be described as a ‘transitional’ figure. He mediated between the pro-slavery sentiment of mid-eighteenth-century statusdriven figureheads and the anti-slavery activism of some members of the New Divinity movement during the late-eighteenth century.54 After Edwards’s death in 1758, his Scottish evangelical friend John Erskine worked with Edwards’s son, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., to publish A History of the Work of Redemption (1774), Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects (1793), and Remarks on Important Theological Controversies (1796).55 During the same period, Edwards Jr. defined slavery as one of many worldly sins that divided individuals and prevented their understanding of the mutuality and universality of sin. The emphasis on mutual sin became more likely than Enlightenment empiricism to provide a language to undermine racialized hierarchies and enslavement in the decades after Edwards’s death. The evangelicalism of Edwards Sr. required the suppression of worldly sins as a necessary sign of the Holy Spirit intervening before the final act of regenerative grace. Though it failed to define the enslavement of Africans in America as one of those sins, it provided a theological paradigm that influenced a later generation of divines, such as Edwards Jr., in the link they drew between individual regeneration and societal change, including the abolition of slavery, as a precursor to the second-coming of Christ.56

54 According to Minkema, Edwards position “represents a transitional stage in the development of antislavery thought among elites between complete advocacy of slavery and the immediatism of his first-generation, New Divinity disciples. Though he himself owned slaves, he did not wholeheartedly defend slavery; rather, his letter acknowledged its inequities and disturbing implications. At the same time, however, Edwards felt that slavery was a necessary evil that served some positive good in the natural order that God had decreed.” See Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” 825. 55 Kimnach, “’Unfearing Minds’: A Transatlantic Brotherhood of Preachers,” 17; Yeager, Enlightened Evangelicalism, 150. 56 Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate,” 49–61; Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, ”All things were new and astonishing: Edwardsean Piety, the New Divinity, and Race,”in David William Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds., Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 211.

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The New Divinity movement thus broadened Edwards’s discussion of spiritual liberty to include non-white enslaved people within a context of supranational evangelicalism. Without Edwards’s theological and philosophical interventions against Arminianism at mid–century, the anti-slavery discourse of New Divinity leaders such as Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and Jonathan Edwards, Jr., would have been less coherent, and even less explicitly abolitionist. In 1791, for example, Jonathan Edwards Jr. published The Injustice and Impolity of the Slave Trade, and of Slavery. He followed his father in questioning biblical typologies drawn from Exodus and Leviticus, which supposedly supported slavery. Where his father did so to question the slave trade from Africa, Edwards Jr. broadened the theological critique to highlight the ongoing providential history of redemption, governed by divine rather than human intervention, which had raised people to realize the immorality of slavery: unlike earlier generations, whether biblical or more recent, people no longer lived “ignorantly and in unbelief of the truth” regarding the problematic nature of “domestic slavery.” Divine grace had wrought a ‘sense’ of its immorality, to a greater extent than in earlier decades. Using the tools of biblical exegesis provided by father, Edwards Jr. thus broadened his redemptive reading of history.57 Edwards Jr. opposed the notion of stadial societal evolution, popular among Enlightenment theorists, given its use to support the enslavement of individuals from purportedly less advanced contexts: “Should we be willing, that the Africans or any other nation should purchase us, our wives and children, transport us into Africa and there sell us into perpetual and absolute slavery?…Yet why is it not as right for them to treat us in this manner, as it for us to treat them in the same manner? Their colour indeed is different from ours. But does this give us the right to enslave them? The nations of Germany to Guinea have complexions of every shade from the fairest white, to the jetty black: and if a black complexion subject a nation or an individual to slavery; where shall slavery begin? Or where shall it end.” Edwards Jr. claimed that neither North America nor Africa were superior developmentally, and that all their populations required saving grace.58 New Divinity thinker Samuel Hopkins similarly warned that if slavery were not abolished in America, then any other nation’s citizens would be liable to enslave free North Americans.59 57 Minkema, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,” 58. 58 Jonathan Edwards [Jr.], Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade and of the Slavery of Africans… A Sermon (New Haven: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1791), 4–5. 59 Samuel Hopkins, “Essay on the African Slave Trade,” The Providence Gazette and Country Journal, Oct. 6 and 13, 1787, reprinted as “The Slave Trade and Slavery” in Timely Articles on Slavery, 616–618, cited in David S. Lovejoy, “Samuel Hopkins: Religion, Slavery, and the Revolution,” The New England Quarterly 40 (June 1967): 235. Orthodox Calvinists such as Ezra Stiles were also influenced by Edwardsean New Divinity precepts in their turn towards

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During the same period, several free African-Americans and enslaved Africans in America adopted the Calvinist vocabulary of sin and predestination – including from Edwards’s published works – and applied it to their own struggle for emancipation. As Saillant has summarized, “Calvinism seems to have corroborated the deepest structuring elements of the experiences of such men and women as they matured from children living in slavery or servitude into adults desiring freedom, literacy, and membership in a fair society. From Calvinism, this generation of black authors drew a vision of God at work providentially in the lives of black people, directing their sufferings yet promising the faithful among them a restoration to his favor and his presence. Not until around 1815 would African American authors, such as John Jea, explicitly declare themselves against Calvinism and for free-will religion.”60 Prince Hall, an African-American civic leader living in Boston, is thought to have written a thirty-five page commentary on Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption, linking the Edwardsean discussion of sin and salvation to the black struggle for emancipation.61 Earlynineteenth-century black thinkers such as Hall can be described as Edwardsean due to the association they drew between civil freedom and the liberty to work out their salvation as sinners.62 Among people of color who were influenced by the New Divinity movement, such as Lemuel Haynes, “divine benevolence” was thought to require the damnation “of the unregenerate, since God could not have consistently loved himself and his creation at the same time as he accepted sinners into heaven. Sin became, then, a providential means of revealing divine benevolence, since God had designed evil as the occasion of the damnation of the unregenerate and the revelation of his glory and goodness.”63 Edwardsean critiques of Arminian theology also exerted a strong legacy among white abolitionists during the nineteenth century. An early generation of American literary historians noted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s debt to Edwards. According to Parrington, her “particular hero and saint was Jonathan Edwards.” In Foster’s estimation, Stowe represented the legacy of “Edwardsean Calvinism.”64 According to Westra, Stowe was directly influenced by her reading of

60 61 62 63 64

more radical abolitionism. On Ezra Stiles’s interaction with black New Englanders and his opposition to the slave trade, see Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican, 89, 129–134. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 243; John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4. Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition,” 61. Saillant, “African American Engagements with Edwards in the Era of the Slave Trade,” 145. Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican, 87. Parrington and Foster cited in Helen Petter Westra, “Confronting Antichrist: The Influence of Jonathan Edwards’s Millennial Vision,” in Mason I. Lowance Jr., Ellen E. Westbrook, and R. C. De Prospro eds., The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 141–142.

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Edwards’s moral philosophy in her developing understanding of the necessity of active participation in the “sacred work of redemption so that Christ could return and judge the nations” – a theological concept that “permeates Stowe’s thinking as part of a received tradition passed down by, among others, Edwards’s son Jonathan Edwards, Jr., a theologian and editor of his father’s chief millennial work, A History of the Work of Redemption; by Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy, both of whom were Edwards’s students and authors of well-known dissertations on the millennium; by Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards’s grandson and biographer; and by Lyman Beecher, a student of Dwight, a powerful voice in the Second Great Awakening, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father.”65 Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher, reflected Edwards in his desire to promote salvation from universal sin across national borders, rather than privileging the moral sensibility or public blessing of one region over another. Stowe Sr. bestowed a millennial vision to his daughter, with roots in Edwardsean piety, which influenced her opposition to slavery.66 In Samuel Hopkins and among people of color such as Lemuel Haynes, we encounter “prophetic voices who represent the apotheosis of the Edwardsean tradition. Indeed, on the subject of race and equality, it was Hopkins and Haynes —not Edwards—who were so far ahead of their times that our own is barely catching up.”67 In fact, the perceived debt of the New Divinity movement to Edwards even led pro-slavery southern Presbyterians to distance themselves from Edwards’s legacy more generally. As Lucas has shown, given “the influence of “Edwards and his school,” its relationship to abolitionism, and its influence in the New School branch of the Presbyterian church, southern Presbyterian theologians became increasingly concerned to distance themselves from Edwards and his followers.”68

4.5

Hutcheson, Slavery, and the New Divinity

Edwards’s correspondence with Scottish evangelicals followed an earlier intellectual and theological encounter with the writings of Francis Hutcheson, which coincided with his efforts to draft his “Letter on Slavery.” A professor of 65 66 67 68

Westra, “Confronting Antichrist: The Influence of Jonathan Edwards’s Millenial Vision,” 142. Westra, “Confronting Antichrist: The Influence of Jonathan Edwards’s Millenial Vision,”148. Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition,” 60–72. Lucas cited in Burns, “Trusting the Theology of a Slave Owner,” 165. See also Sean Michael Lucas, “‘He Cuts Up Edwardsism by the Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsean Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century South,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition, ed. D. G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 202.

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moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and a Presbyterian minister through to his death in 1746, Hutcheson has subsequently been described as the “father” of the Scottish Enlightenment.69 From the late-1730s, Edwards’s attempt to provide a system for ministers to verify the signs of revival and salvation among congregants attracted him to Hutcheson’s moral philosophical vocabulary, as was evidenced in works such as Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1742), Some Thoughts concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1743), and Religious Affections (1746). Though Edwards opposed Arminian sentiment, he believed that the sentimental terminology of Hutchesonian moral philosophy could be useful in its ability to describe the signs of religious awakening with greater analytical precision.70 Edwards eventually began to critique Hutcheson more explicitly, culminating in his Freedom of the Will (1754), which isolated “Arminian” moral philosophy for enhancing the capability of the unregenerate will.71 Yet he did not jettison the helpful terminology provided by Hutcheson, which could be used to described the sensory awakening by grace.72 More work is needed to examine how Edwards’s close encounter with Hutchesonian philosophy from the late-1730s through the early 1740s could have influenced his ambiguous response to American slavery during the same period. Hutcheson, after all, was a key influence in colonial American philosophical discussions of freedom and liberty at mid–century: as Fiering underlines, the Scottish divine was “probably the most influential and respected moral philosopher in America in the eighteenth century.”73 Though Edwards never directly connected his reading of Hutcheson to his discussion of American slavery, we can still find interpretative value in considering how his close reading of Hutcheson may have influenced his conception of freedom and liberty more broadly.

69 T. D. Campbell, “Francis Hutcheson: ’Father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, eds., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1982), 167–185. 70 On Edwards’s interest in Hutcheson in these ways see Avihu Zakai, “Jonathan Edwards, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of Protestant Tradition in America,” in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 188; Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 128–130. 71 WJE 8:562–563, 575; WJE 1:369–378; Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 112–113, 115. 72 See Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” Harvard Theological Review, XLI (1948), 129; Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York, 1971), 100; Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (University Park: Penn State Press, 2011), 99–100; Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1981), 337–340; WJE, 7:689–705. 73 Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 3, 53, 56.

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On the one hand, Hutcheson questioned the validity of classical justifications for slavery and asserted the superiority of more recent theories of civic and moral order. His aesthetic definition of moral perception claimed that individuals were able to deploy their sense of common good in the same way that they perceived objects as beautiful or ugly. Preventing their civic freedom, through enslavement, risked obscuring those innate sensibilities.74 On the other hand, Hutcheson’s developing conception of societal liberty increasingly hinged on the proper use of innate sensibilities towards their societal benefits. His A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) was published after his death and became widely read during the second half of the eighteenth century in North America, in and beyond Edwards’s sphere. That sensibilities were to be cultivated towards (assumedly pre-determined) civic ends helps to explain how Hutcheson’s treatise could comfortably define the validity of certain forms of servitude, including slavery. The latter became legitimate when individuals reneged on the civic duties that ought to have been implied by their innate sensibility.75 That the universally innate ethical sense still required cultivation therefore led to an ambiguity in the Scottish Enlightenment discussion of slavery, as defined by Hutcheson and the theorists who followed him. The attempt to rank provincial societies according to their relative moral development characterized those who defined the privileged stadial development of certain provinces, such as Scotland, within the British imperial realm. Some theorists even provided ethical and philosophical support for the enslavement of individuals who did not share the civilizational advancement that underlay privileged societal status – a darker and less universal aspect of Enlightenment theory, which scholars have increasingly begun to investigate.76 And so, the Scottish Enlightenment vision of innate moral sensibility could also be used to justify the continuation of hierarchical distinctions, and even enslavement. The term ‘common sense,’ we should recall, was appropriated from a classical era when slavery was not always thought to repudiate the notion of a common good. Though moral sensibilities were innate, they could be cultivated and distinguished according to different societal contexts; potentially justifying 74 See W. Sypher, “Hutcheson and the Classical Theory of Slavery,” Journal of Negro History 24 (1939): 263–80; Robert Forbes, “Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment,” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, ed. John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 73. 75 Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy., 2: 201–2; Rozbicki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, 49–50. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 377, 426. 76 See T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 247, 249; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 392, 424; Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 57–59; Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress, 7–9, 55–59.

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paternalistic assumptions about the validity of chattel slavery among those whose sensibility had not been properly cultivated, or who did not live up to common civil norms in some way.77 Edwards supported the slaveholding status of a minister whose Arminian leanings were closer to the general tenets of Hutchesonian moral philosophy than he might have liked. But the Scottish Enlightenment’s potential support for social divisions, including slavery, is more congruent with figures such as Thomas Jefferson than those who were directly influenced by the Northampton minister. By the 1790s, Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy was sometimes employed by educated American slaveholders to justify their paternalistic authority over enslaved people.78 Nonetheless, Edwards’s association with Hutcheson raises the possibility of a third, ironic, legacy in relation to American slavery. In incorporating some of Hutcheson’s theological vocabulary to describe the role of God’s grace in allowing individuals to ‘sense’ good and bad, Edwards opened the possibility that a later generation of theologians would deduce human-centered ethical inferences from that which he had used to supply a useful theological vocabulary. New Divinity thinkers such as Samuel Hopkins employed Edwardsean motifs in their discussion of transnational sin and the immorality of the slave trade. But at times, their encounter with Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy, including through the prism of Edwards’s writings, drew them a little closer towards the notion that individuals enjoyed an innate ability to transcend their sin. They suggested that divine grace simply “restored” the natural ethical purview of all men, who somehow enjoyed a “common sense” of the world’s natural benevolent order.79

77 See the critique of Scottish common-sense philosophy and its association with slaveholding in Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, 178–79. See also Maurice S. Lee, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 119. On the ability of common-sense philosophy to support social stratification more generally, see Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 144–147, 25–35, 43–45. 78 Forbes, “Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment,” 89–92; Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (Aldershot, U.K., 2008), 1–19. On paternalism among American slave owners and Scottish Enlightenment influences see Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 54. 79 See Noll, America’s God, 132, 136; Mark A. Noll, “The Enlightenment and Evangelical Intellectual Life,” in Peter A. Coclanis and Stuart Bruchey, eds., Ideas, ideologies, and Social Movements: The United States Experience since 1800 (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1999), 49–50; Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1981), 118; Donald H. Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenment (New York, 1976), 30–33.

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Hopkins thus expanded Edwards’s discussion of divine ‘benevolence’ and incorporated it in his discussion of the immediate necessity of anti-slavery activity, which somehow derived from an innate generous sensibility that God had implanted in all individuals. Edwards sought to define the nature of “disinterested benevolence” according to a love for “Being in General” or “God and his Creatures” that followed regeneration. But according to Hopkins, as Lovejoy has pointed out, the notion of disinterested benevolence turned on “unselfish goodness not just to mankind in general or even to one’s enemies, but primarily to those who needed benevolence most, that is, the oppressed of mankind… [so that] slavery was an offense to Christian benevolence.”80 Here, then, we can trace a more radical direction in the trajectory of moral sense reasoning, as distinct from its employment in favor of cultivated sensibility and the buttressing of existing social hierarchies, including slavery. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe incorporated a notion of innate benevolence in her critiques of slavery, notwithstanding the millennial vision of universal salvation from sin that she also employed. As Westra has suggested, Stowe took “the millennial tradition she had received from Edwards and her father” and “modified it to proclaim a gospel of compassion and benevolence” in order “to bring home the message that slavery is antiChristian and must be abolished…”81 In his correspondence with Scottish ministers and teachers, then, Edwards highlighted the tension between the promotion of individualistic evangelicalism and the need for ministerial assurance of salvation among laymen. The correspondence helps us to understand Edwards’s motivations during and after the Doolittle affair. The notion of privileged societal development – whether as expressed in the idea of a blessed public covenant or according to the Scottish Enlightenment conception of advanced stadial evolution – became especially problematic for Edwards through the 1740s because it eschewed what he viewed as the inevitable and necessary struggle to assure the truth of regeneration. Before these concerns became especially clear in his Scottish correspondence, Edwards demonstrated them in his repudiation of the moral certainty of antislavery congregants in the Doolittle affair. Edwards’s desire to check the pride of anti-slavery laymen reflected his privileged position, or perhaps his lack of experience among actual enslaved people. In criticizing their supposed hypocrisy in condemning slavery while enjoying the broader benefits of life in a slave economy, Edwards focused his ire on the moral self-righteousness of anti-slavery actors, rather than considering the status of enslaved people themselves as a primary concern. 80 David S. Lovejoy, “Samuel Hopkins: Religion, Slavery, and the Revolution,” The New England Quarterly 40 (June 1967): 232–234. 81 Westra, “Confronting Antichrist: The Influence of Jonathan Edwards’s Millenial Vision,” 158.

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Edwards incorporated Scottish Enlightenment and evangelical vocabularies in his developing moral philosophy. Both contributed to a worldview that made him comfortable in his support for an Arminian slaveholder, yet which also heralded an anti-slavery legacy in the New Divinity movement. In questioning the special moral status of any one community over another, contrary to the notion of stadial societal development, Edward influenced subsequent generations who proposed the mutual necessity of religious revival across the color line. They opposed legal and racial distinctions between slaveholders and the enslaved, including those that were deployed by Enlightenment theorists. Yet, in parallel, Edwards’s early adoption of Hutchesonian sensory terminology heralded a separate and unintended consequence. Some of those who have been described as Edwardsean proponents of New Divinity opposed slavery in order to remove a societal sin as a precursor to a new millennium. But others emphasized the innate ability of humans to act from their moral sense to redeem themselves – and their society – by opposing the institution; while many more adopted more gradualist or even conservative approaches in their approach to slavery.

John T. Lowe (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)*

Destruction and Benevolence The New Divinity and Origins of Abolitionism in Edwardsean Tradition

5.1

Introduction

During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and for the better part of the eighteenth century, the majority of New England Christianity—whether Protestant or Roman Catholic—did not concern itself with slavery or racial issues, nor was it one the main points of clerical contention. Its primary debates were over theological and ecclesiastical matters. Moreover, the sheer lack of discussion of slavery and the racial divide between Whites, Africans, and Native Americans in Edwards’s writings indicate how little of concern it was in the early eighteenth century. But for Edwards’s followers, the tension between Whites and Africans had come to the forefront of both political and religious conversation on a national level. Antislavery sentiment combined with ideas of reform and revolution gave way to a new theological movement that would favor abolitionism. Unlike Edwards himself, his followers published sermons and literature in full opposition to both slavery and the slave trade—making his theological heirs quite different. Scholars over the last century and a half have “generally characterized the New England Theology as continuous” and “any changes being consistent with Edwards’s own intentions,” but “critics have tended to discover discontinuity” with “each development within the tradition viewed as a departure from Edwards’s Calvinism.”1 Over the last several decades, the subject of Edwards’s influence within the New England theological tradition has received * The author would like to thank Kenneth P. Minkema and Willem van Vlastuin for their guidance during the development of this essay. He is also grateful for the support from Mary E. Lowe during the process of editing this volume, and for the collaborative efforts of his friend Daniel N. Gullotta. 1 Douglas A. Sweeney, “Edwards and His Mantle: The Historiography of the New England Theology,” in The New England Quarterly 71, No. 1 (March 1998): 100.

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much attention.2 Nevertheless, a full account of his thought and impact on the New Divinity in abolitionism, as well as into the nineteenth-century, has been fairly unknown until recently, and the most recent scholarship on Edwards’s legacy concerning slavery has focused only on him as a slave owner—and giving only minimal treatment to Samuel Hopkins.3 To understand the New Divinity as abolitionists, one must understand Edwards as a precursor to later eighteenthcentury and nineteenth-century thought. By and large, in both popular thought and academic study, figures in the American anti-slavery narrative have fit into two distinct categories: slave owning pro-slavery advocates or liberating anti-slavery abolitionists. The logical selfdescription of both being that those who owned or bought slaves were expressing their pro-slavery position, and those who had liberated their slaves, or refused to buy any, were expressing their anti-slavery abolitionism. But as always with Edwards, his thought makes this more complicated than a simple dichotomy. Having studied with Edwards and his writings after his death, the New Divinity brought new perspectives to his theology concerning true virtue and benevolence. As it evolved from its Edwardsean origin, the New Divinity’s doctrine of disinterested benevolence became a socio-religious ethnic rather than simply a pious doctrine, thus questioning the established pecking order of the Britishcolonial ethos. This chapter will systematically trace Edwards’s theological legacy of abolitionism from his death up through the New Divinity until the early nineteenth century. It will also demonstrate how Edwards’s legacy is far reaching that just his slave owning restrict him to be, and that he does not perfectly fit in either category of a strict pro-slavery or abolitionist, but instead, represents a transitional stage between the two positions and, therefore, a progenitor of abolitionist thought in New England. To do so, this chapter will serve three different purposes. The first will be to offer a brief overview of Edwards’s position on slavery. The second will consider the New Divinity’s argument against slavery and the slave trade. The third will 2 For examples of Edwards’s influence on New England theology see George Nye Boardman, A History of New England Theology (New York: A.D.F. Randolf Company, 1899); Joseph A Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1981); Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “All Things Were New and Astonishing: Edwardsian Piety, the New Divinity, and Race,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Edited by David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) 121–136. 3 For information on Hopkins and ethics, see Stephen G. Post, Christian Love and Self-Denial: An Historical and Normative Study of Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, and American Theological Ethics (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 1987); Todd M. Brennenman, “Samuel Hopkins,” in Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, ed. John R. Shook (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 551–555.

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discuss how New Divinity figure Samuel Hopkins built upon—and yet differentiated between—Edwards’s doctrines of true virtue and disinterested benevolence. As will be shown, these key theologies would be the crux where the New Divinity pushes Edwards’s doctrine forward into humanitarian application. By tracing the theological heritage of the New Divinity’s social reform, Edwards— although as slaver—should be considered as an abolitionist forerunner, and even harbinger for emancipation.

5.2

Edwards and Slavery

Prior to the discovery of Edwards’s draft letter on the subject, very little was known about his formal theological views about slavery and the slave trade other than the fact that he was indeed a slave owner. To date, it is the only surviving work devoted to the issue—simply a fragment compared the rest of his literary corpus.4 Within the letter, Edwards condemned the transatlantic slave trade, but also offered his defense for slavery as an institution. Edwards appealed to his usual method of first using rationale and second scripture in his defense of slavery, satisfying both the areas of faith and reason to explain his defense of the institution of slavery, and the denouement of the transatlantic slave trade.5

5.2.1 Edwards’s Rationale Making a case through the avenue of reason was not something unusual for the New England divine. But even as a logician, it’s striking that Edwards would have devoted a small portion of logic in his defense when addressing other ministers. The necessity of both faith and reason from the Enlightenment were already evident among the New England clergy. In any case, he condemned the accusations leveled toward proslavery as hypocrisy. Rebounding from their charges, Edwards suggested that the abolitionist-forerunners, those criticizing all who owned slaves, were just as guilty and “partakers of a far more cruel slavery than 4 WJE 16:71–76. For a more detailed examination of Edwards’s draft letter, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4, (October 1997), 823–34. 5 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” 823. Minkema states, “The draft is typical of Edwards’s habits of letter writing. In preparing many of his letters, particularly those of an important nature, Edwards first sketched out major points and transitions in an elliptical, stream-of-consciousness manner on scrap paper and then wrote the letter in full on good foolscap. Often his full meaning is obscured by this method of composition.”

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that which they object against in those that have slaves.”6 Whereas those who opposed slavery were not “immediate partakers,”—people who did not directly participate in slave owning—were in fact indirectly supporting the slavery and the enterprise by profiting from its labor and consuming goods it produced. As far as Edwards was concerned, they simply had “their slaves at the next step,” and protesting the slave trade while reaping its benefits only increased the demand for slaves.7 Here, Edwards implied that if the “hypocrites” are going to be “partakers”—beneficiaries—of the slave trade, they might as well fully participate in slave owning. If the “hypocrites” won, the only realistic option Edwards foresaw happening was a complete dissolution of the slave trade by boycotting, thus, putting a large enough dent into the economic to alter the upper class and to sway their minds. By the eighteenth century, the entire New England economy was dependent upon the African slave trade and the products it produced—including several major seaports that were deeply involved in the transatlantic slave business.8 Edwards knew it was not likely, nor was he ready to side with the anti-slave owners. Moreover, he did not see halting slavery necessary. Edwards also appealed to the natural—and necessary—experience of eating in his logic in favor for slavery. Referring to the sin of gluttony, Edwards stated the actions of “eating and drinking tends to sin” and that a “world of iniquity” is the result of eating and drinking.9 This analogy might seem a bit odd, but Edwards saw both as necessary evils. While eating and drinking could potentially lead to the sin of gluttony, they were both necessary for sustaining one’s health. Edwards viewed slavery just the same. Even though the institution of slavery could lead to the evils of “cruel labor,” he did not see its potential immorality compelling enough to “abstain from sin.”10 Slavery in and of itself, like food and drink, was not sin, but could possibly lead to sin if not handled correctly. Using this rationale to make a case for his defense of slavery, Edwards set himself a platform to begin arguing from scripture. It is important to note that not once did he make a reference to slavery as sin. As an institution, Edwards always viewed it hierarchical position in society, and not as a reflection of one’s

6 WJE 16:72. 7 WJE 16:72. 8 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 258; Thomas S. Kidd, American Colonial History: Clashing of Cultures and Faiths (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 173. Kidd also notes that “In the northern colonies, slavery never became as integral to the domestic farming economy as it did in the regions to the south. But norther seaport merchants invested in the Atlantic slave trade, and slaves continued arriving in those seaports—usually coming from the Caribbean, rather than direct from Africa—in small numbers through the beginning of the Revolution.” 9 WJE 16:74. For biblical examples of gluttony as sin, see Prov. 23:1–2, 20–21, and Gal. 5:19–21. 10 WJE 74.

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spiritual standing. Continuing in his argumentative method, Edwards proceeded to use the Bible in his defense of slavery and denouncement of the slave trade.

5.2.2 Edwards Use of Scripture Like any Evangelical writing on such a topic, including his contemporaries (defending or opposing it), Edwards looked to the Bible to support his defense of slavery and denouncement of the slave trade.11 While he was well-read among other eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, both in American and Europe, he found himself contrary to their approach and “viewed the Bible itself as a convincing argument,” and saw it as the rule for examining the Christian experience.12 Within the aforementioned draft letter, Edwards used passages from both Old and New Testament to support his position. He began by denouncing the slave trade and claiming its very business was on false biblical precepts. Often one of the cases made for the slave trade came from its apparent similarity to the Exodus—specifically when God gave the Israelites permission to plunder the wealth of the Egyptians in Deuteronomy 15:6.13 In the minds of pro-slave traders, this biblical narrative gave them precedent to forcibly remove people from their native land and place them in a life of submissive servitude. But for Edwards this was a “blasphemous” excuse to “disfranchise” people from the African nations.14 The question Edwards sought to answer was, “Is it biblically permissible to enslave people—and in this particular case, nonChristians?” In opposition to the biblical defense of the slave trade, Edwards replied that “God might, by special interpretation, execute punishment on a people and me men the executioners,” but “to make it an established rule in all cases… is a monstrous supposition,” and in itself “unreasonable.”15 He came to 11 An example of a predecessor using the Bible to oppose slavery is Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph published three year before Edwards was born. In it, Sewall uses several different passages from both Old and New Testament opposing slavery. See Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston: Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700), 1–3. 12 Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 170. For more information and examples of Edwards being exposed to transatlantic Enlightenment ideas see Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context, Jonathan Edwards Classic Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 15–26. 13 This biblical narrative may be found in Ex. 12:33–41. The permission God granted the ancient Israelites to take from the Egyptians in Deut. 15:6 states, “For the Lord your God will bless you, as he promised you, and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow, and you shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you.” 14 WJE 16:73. 15 WJE 16:74.

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believe it was unjustifiable to take people from their homes against their will, and put them in bondage, and that it “would have much greater tendency to sin, to have liberty to disfranchise whole nations.”16 Rather than making what would become a popular parallel between America and Israel, Edwards saw discontinuity between the two—at least in this scenario—and did not view his fellow American Christians of the New Testament as the same as the Israelites under the Old. Edwards saw this as a moral issue and contended that “All of God’s rules” have “moral equity in them,” and, therefore, robbing entire peoples of their freedom, liberty, and privileges is in opposition to what the Bible teaches.17 “A special precept,” as Edwards stated, “for a particular act is not a rule.”18 The root of Edwards’s denouncement of the slave trade was based on his understanding of “neighbor.” Giving special attention to this term, and its usage, Edwards exposed the deceitful hermeneutic slave traders were using to justify their commercial slave-enterprise. Those in favor of the slave trade understood “neighbors” in a very narrow sense. For them, neighbors were limited to only other fellow Christians, and, therefore, the treatment—whether it be moral or immoral—toward non-Christians is permissible. To combat this very exclusive definition of the word, Edwards quoted Exodus 20:16, and asserted that even during the time of the ancient Israelites, “All mankind were their neighbors then.”19 The pro-slave trade definition of neighbor undermined the true moral law Christians were instructed to obey, and to hold this definition made the “Scripture contradict itself.”20 Referring to Acts 17:30, Edwards noted that God had permitted certain practices of the Israelites beforehand—during “those times of darkness”—but that God does not “wink at such things now under the Gospel.”21 Within his definition of neighbor, Edwards argued that the Israelites, their exceptional “chosen-ness,” and God’s partiality toward them had ended with the Old covenant, and that all peoples, regardless of race, nation, or culture were subject to the same moral law of the New Testament.

16 17 18 19 20 21

WJE 16:74. WJE 16:74. WJE 16:74. WJE 16:74. WJE 16:75. WJE 16:75. Acts 17:30 states, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”

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The New Divinity and Slavery

The New Divinity movement began with Jonathan Edwards, but it would look radically different from him by the end of the eighteenth century. The difference from Edwards was that the New Divinity men represented a melding of political and religious conviction birthed out of a Calvinistic tradition into a single antislavery movement that promoted equalitarianism among all races. While the literature they published contained both political and theological arguments for ending chattel slavery, the root of their abolitionism was their Edwardsean Calvinism which in turn informed their politics. The New Divinity had read— and some had even lived with—Edwards and in their minds were taking the next steps toward a “consistent Calvinism” by promoting a new breed of socio-religious ethics that were distinctly Edwardsean—and at the same time not Edwardsean at all. Whereas Edwards had disapproved of the slave trade but kept slaves and promoted it as an institution, the New Divinity who owned slaves freed them and thought it their Christian duty; whether it be using the political climate to their advantage or through theological conviction, to help liberate all African slaves from across the young American republic. Even though Edwards’s doctrines of virtue and benevolence were well received among his disciples, the argument here will be that they applied these doctrines differently and manifested a changed direction of ethics within New England theology—specifically toward racial equality in the abolishment of slavery, and a reconciliation of hostilities between Whites and Africans and the gospel. There will be four reasons offered to support this. First, the New Divinity used basic arguments of rationale and human morality to condemn slavery. Observing the inhumane treatment of African slaves and exposing the fallacies within the arguments justifying manstealing led to the moral conversion of the New Divinity. Second, the New Divinity unashamedly exploited Revolutionary philosophy in the cause of human equality. The political notions of “freedom,” “equality,” and the like, were concepts they easily used to further ideas of emancipation for slaves and equality among all races. Third, the New Divinity viewed slavery, in addition to the slave trade, contrary to the Christian message. As far as the New Divinity was concerned, the maltreatment Africans were receiving was the only notion of Christianity they were aware of. Fourth, and the most important of the three, were their interpretations of Edwards’s doctrine of true virtue and holiness, and disinterested benevolence. Edwards’s doctrines aimed benevolence and the selfless good toward God, and while in agreement with Edwards, the New Divinity, like Samuel Hopkins, emphasized that showing benevolence and selfless good toward God meant that one would in turn show the same toward others—in this case, African slaves. For the New Divinity, to fully practice Christian virtue—moreover, “to be” a Christian—meant to operate with disinterested benevolence and

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selfless good toward, not only God as Edwards suggested, but to all beings and those who needed it most—those oppressed in slavery.

5.3.1 Human Morality Much like their Puritan predecessors, the New Divinity saw the most important rules for social governance were derived from the Bible. However, it was not their only tool. In nearly every essay they published contained two rationales: the appeal to basic morality—observing the cruelties and inhumanity of the slave trade and slavery itself—and exposing the logical fallacies of justifying manstealing. Members of the New Divinity had seen first-hand the buying and selling of Africans from the slave ports of New England and their brutal treatment aboard the vessels coming into the colonies. While Edwards never described anything he saw at the slave trading centers, Hopkins and Edwards, Jr. both described the obvious horrors they had seen as the result of slavery and made it a key reason to abolish slavery. The most firebrand abolitionist among Edwards’s followers was undoubtedly Samuel Hopkins. After some controversy with his church in Great Barrington he left in 1769 and accepted a call from the First Congregation of Newport, RI on April 11, 1770.22 Hopkins had already seen the mistreatment of Native Americans in Stockbridge, but it was there at Newport where Hopkins witnessed the cruel treatment of slaves being imported from the west African coast—the very same location where Edwards purchased his slaves. Newport had become a large commercial center for “negro trafficking,” owning fifty-nine of the two-hundred and two slave ships carrying Africans up and down the colonial coast.23 The majority of Newport’s residents gained their wealth one way or another from its deep involvement with the slave system. It truly was the “Great slave market of New England” and Hopkins knew it.24 Hopkins detested all of the slave trading at Newport: The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share in this traffic of all these United States. This trade in the human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended. That town has been built upon, and flourished in times 22 Samuel Hopkins, Works of Samuel Hopkins with a Memoir of His Life and Character, ed. Edwards A. Park, vol. 1 (Boston, 1854), 79–83. Henceforth, title will be abbreviated WSH; Conkin, “Samuel Hopkins,” 315; Plato, “Samuel Hopkins,” 305. 23 WSH 1:115. 24 Wilkins Updike, A History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett Rhode Island Including a History of the Other Episcopal Church in the State (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1907), 170–174.

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past, at the expense of the blood, the liberty, and happiness of the poor Africans; and the inhabitants have lived on this, and by it have gotten most of their wealth and riches.25

Park recorded that Hopkins “often looked upon the cargoes of Africans who were landed at the wharves near his meeting-house and parson.”26 It was moments like those that the New Divinity’s conviction began to end slavery. Hopkins’s efforts to convince the American colonies are found in four different texts; two he addressed to the Continental Congress, A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the African (1776), An Address to the Owners of Negro Slaves in the American Colonies (1776), and A Discourse upon the Slave Trade and the Slavery of the Africans (1793) and The Slave Trade and Slavery (1787). “Volumes might be written,” Hopkins addressed Congress, “and not give a detail of a thousandth part of the shockingly cruel things they have suffered and are constantly suffering.”27 In hopes of convincing Congress and the American people of the “open and gross violation” of slavery, Hopkins’s recalled observations and concluded that even on the basis of human rights, slavery was an abomination—moreover, a heinous sin. He asserted, “It is, therefore, become a national sin, and a sin of the first magnitude—a sin which righteous Heaven has never suffered to pass unpunished in this world.”28 In addition to describing the obvious horrors of slavery led the New Divinity, like Hopkins and Edwards, Jr., to expose the fallacies of the logic pro-slavery activists were using to justify their business. There were several angles slavers used to defend themselves against their protesters, but for each of the popular arguments for slavery the New Divinity readily answered. For them, there was not a sufficient argument that could excuse robbing people of their liberty and reducing them to a life of submission, whether by reason or by the Bible. The New Divinity saw taking people by force from their native land into a foreign one to be put into a life of submission was unjust in itself. Even if the slave holders in America were supposedly nonviolent toward the slaves themselves, they too were continuing the unrighteousness and violence exercised by means of enslaving them. Hopkins argued that they have “never forfeited their liberty or given any one a right to enslave and sell them,” and, “have yet as much a right to their liberty as ever they had, and to demand it of him who holds them in bondage.”29 Further against man-stealing, Edwards, Jr. posed the question: If there was any just cause to simply remove Africans from their home, what unjust cause would there be for any other nation to come to America and do the same to 25 26 27 28 29

WSH 1:614. WSH 1:115. WSH 1:555–556. WSH 1:614–615. WSH 2:560.

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them? He asked, “Should we be willing, that the Africans or any other nation should purchase us, our wives and children, transport us into African and there sell us into perpetual and absolute slavery? …Yet why is it not as right for them to treat us in this manner, as it is for us to treat them in the same manner?30 To take away a person’s liberty and reducing their humanness was just as vile as robbing or murdering them. Going further, Edwards, Jr. reasoned, “Their color indeed is different from ours. But does this give us a right to enslave them?” The fact that White Anglo-Westerners were somehow superior to darker skinned people was illogical to the New Divinity. “The nations from Germany to Guinea have complexions of every shade from the fairest of white to a jetty black; and if a black complexion subject a nation or an individual to slavery, where shall slavery begin, or where shall it end?”31 For the New Divinity, the color of skin did not denote superiority or inferiority between any race, and, therefore, whites who forced blacks to be subjects was unjust. Here, the New Divinity triumphed over two things by challenging manstealing; they exposed the blatant inconsistency of the pros-slavery logic to steal a person and rejected outright racial prejudices.

5.3.2 Exploiting Revolutionary Philosophy As Edwardseans, faith and politics went hand-in-hand—one’s politics was simply an outworking of one’s doctrine. After all, what made the New Divinity unique was applying their New England theology to social ethics and, thus, formulating a particular political opinion. There have been several studies that argue Evangelical Calvinism as the underlying cause of the American Revolution, and as Mark Valeri has shown, the New Divinity was much more directly engaged with politics than has previously been assumed. Building upon that idea, the New Divinity exploited revolutionary philosophies of the time to reinforce their abolitionism.32 Namely, their abolitionism coincided with Revolutionary ideas of freedom in two distinct dovetailing ideas: they likened the oppression of slaves as to the oppression from Great Britain, and the equality for all people regardless of race. During the New Divinity’s crusade to end slavery in America, the Declaration of Independence began the war between Great Britain and her Thirteenth Col30 Jonathan Edwards, Jr., Works of Jonathan Edwards, D.D., Late President of Union College with a Memoir of His Life and Character, ed. Tyron Edwards, vol. 2, 76. Henceforth will be abbreviated WJEJ. 31 WJEJ 2:76. 32 Mark Valeri, “The New Divinity and the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly 46, No. 4 (October 1989): 741–769.

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onies and had all but ravaged the new country. Prior to the war, the New Divinity had already begun making the comparison of oppression between the colonies and England and Whites and Africans. In a series of essays in 1773, Edwards, Jr. stated that “while we in the Americans colonies, have been so jealous of our own liberties, and so cautious to guard against every encroachment upon them from our mother country; we have been inattentive to our own conduct in enslaving the Negroes.”33 For the White American colonists to war against their oppression from Britain and at the same time oppress Africans, in Hopkins’s mind, was a “wicked contradiction.”34 He argued, “Is it possible that the Americans should, after all this, and in the face of this light and conviction, and after they had obtained liberty and independence for themselves, continue to hold hundreds of thousands of their fellow-men in the most abject slavery?”35 In one sense, King George was the master over the colonists just as the colonists were masters over African slaves. Sermon texts were filled with how nations should see divine moral government, and that the oppression from Great Britain was an unrighteous act. From the pulpit in May of 1776, Joseph Bellamy exclaimed to his congregation, “The British Empire is ripe for destruction.”36 The God who loves righteousness and hates sin would favor patriots and the fight to free themselves not only from England, but free Africans as well. Therefore, sermons exhorted Americans that to fight against England’s oppression for equality was a Christian duty. The underlying philosophy for America’s new-found freedom was that God had created all people with the same equality. Nevertheless, they did not immediately apply the same concept when it came to their African slaves. In the spring of 1776, shortly before the Declaration of Independence, Hopkins thought he might use the opportunity to discuss emancipation while the hot ideas of freedom where being discussed among Congress. He tied the American cause of liberty and its struggle to the holding of Africans in bondage. He urged Congress to become the “happy instruments of procuring and establishing universal liberty to white and black.”37 “The sons of liberty oppressing and tyrannizing over many thousands of poor blacks who have as good a claim to liberty as themselves, they 33 Jonathan Edwards, Jr. and Ebenezer Baldwin, Some Observations upon the Slavery of Negroes, October 1773, ed. Roger Bruns, in Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America 1688–1788 (New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977), 291–92. 34 WSH 2:617. 35 WSH 2:618. 36 Mark Valeri, Law and Providence, 140. There is no full-length modern biography of Bellamy. For more biographical information on Bellamy, see both unpublished dissertations, Glenn Paul Anderson, Joseph Bellamy 1719–1790: The Man and His Work, Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University Graduate School, 1971; Michael P. Anderson, The Pope of Litchfield County: An Intellectual Biography of Joseph Bellamy, 1719–1790 (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1980). Also see, Valeri, Law and Providence, 1994. 37 WSH 2:550.

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are shocked with the glaring inconsistence, and wonder they themselves do not see it.”38 Hoping that an American victory for freedom would lead to the immediate emancipation of Africans, the Revolutionary War left the New Divinity disappointed. The “truths to be self-evident” that were given by God for Americans, and that “all men are created equal,” had only been applied to Whites.39 Even after the war, the New Divinity was still openly criticizing the slavery and treatment of Africans. Edwards, Jr. declared, “It is a principle, the truth of which hath in this country been generally, if not universally acknowledged, ever since the commencement of the late war, that all men are born equally free.”40 He continued to make the comparison and essentially called Americans hypocrites for refusing to give Africans their freedom when they were fighting for the same freedom. For the New Divinity abolitionists, “Great Britain in her late attempt to enslave American committed a very small crime indeed in comparison with the crime of those who enslave Africans.”41 The “unalienable rights” for humans to freely seek “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” as the Declaration had avowed were still denied to Africans. The infuriated Hopkins continued to publicly attacked slavery and reasoned, “This leaves in our minds no doubt of your being sensible of the equal unrighteousness and oppression, as well as inconsistence with ourselves, in holding so many hundreds of thousands of black in slavery, who have an equal right to freedom with ourselves, while we are maintain this struggle for our own and our children’s liberty.”42 The New Divinity viewed Americans that continued to hold Africans in bondage and who, at the same time, fought for independence as charlatans. As patriots, they were generally satisfied with result of the war, but it was still tainted with disgust that the “great and public sin” of slavery was still tolerated in the new nation that boasted liberty and justice.43 While the outcome of the war was a victory, it felt more like a defeat for the New Divinity and their cause for abolitionism. In the end, the abolishment of the “free system of English Laws” was biased toward skin color and led to an inequalitarian and contradictory American-ethos that favored Whites and denied Africans the very equality that was fought for in the war.

38 WSH 2:571. 39 The full quote from the Declaration of Independence is as follow, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 40 WJEJ 2:76. 41 WJEJ 2: 88–89. 42 WSH 2:549. 43 WSH 2:551.

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5.3.3 Slavery Contrary to the Christian Message A common argument in favor of slavery was that Africans, who were heathens and lived in land unknown to Christianity, were being provided access to the Christian message. Many pro-slavery activists boasted that they brought “slaves from a heathen land to places of the gospel light, and so put them under special advantages to be saved.”44 While it was undoubtedly true that some Africans who previously lived in an environment without access to the Bible were being geographically relocated where their salvation was possible, most knew, including the New Divinity, that it was only justify the slave trade, and not as a means of spreading the gospel. Slavery as tool for evangelism was an abhorrent. The New Divinity viewed slavery in complete opposition to the Christianity for two main reasons: first, the they argued that labeling the slave trade as a missionary effort was hypocrisy since there was little to no effort to Christianize them once Africans had arrived in America; and second, slavery ruined any hope of Africans converting to Christianity because it created prejudices toward its message. It was obvious to Hopkins that evangelism was never the goal of slavery. He posed, “Have they any instruction more than if they were beasts? So far from this, that their masters guard against their having any instruction to their utmost.”45 He continued in his tirade, [I]t is right for us to enslave them, that we may bring them into this land of the gospel light, and convey them to Christianity… The argument is nothing to the purpose of justifying our conduct. If it be, it only shows, We do evil that good may come. For where is the warrant in scripture to use such means to propagate the gospel of peace and liberty? Was this the method that Christ and his apostles took?46

Hopkins and the New Divinity saw the “slavery for evangelism” argument as nothing more than an excuse to justify worldly profit. Hopkins did not see any scripture that warranted slavery or made it permissible to evangelize the heathens, rather “this method to Christianize them would be a direct and gross violation of the laws of Christ. He commands us to go and preach the gospel to all nations, to carry the gospel to them, and not to go and with violence bring them from their native country without saying a word to them, or to the nations from whom they are taken, about the gospel or any thing that relates to it.”47 Edwards, Jr. echoed Hopkins in his objection of slavery as a tool to Christianize Africans. 44 WSH 2:556. 45 WSH 2:556. 46 Ebenezer Baldwin and Jonathan Edwards, Jr., “Some Observations upon the Slavery of Negros,” in Am I Not A Man and A Brother: Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688–1788, ed. Roger Bruns (New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977), 294. 47 WSH 2:557.

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His opponents inferred that slaves “are much more happy; that therefore to hold them in slavery is so far from a crime, that it is a meritorious act.”48 To which Edwards, Jr. answered, “It would be ridiculous to pretend, that this is the motive on which they act who import them, or they who buy and hold them in slavery… Neither our Lord Jesus Christ, nor any of his apostles, has taught us this mode of propagating the faith.”49 For the New Divinity, Africans did not have any benefits from being enslaved, let alone salvation. Moreover, the New Divinity’s protest of slavery as a means of Christianization of Africans was that it was doing the exact opposite. Slavery was completely contrary to the Christian message. So much so, that it made Africans develop prejudices against Christianity altogether to where Americans could not expect conversion. The American nuances of freedom, justice, liberty, and independence were far from anything Africans experienced in America. From the moment Africans were torn from their native homeland they experienced the utmost violence, cruelty, and merciless brutality from White Christians. The thought processes happening in the minds of slaves was easy for Hopkins to imagine. He stated, “But now, instead of this, what has been done on that coast by those who pass among the negroes for Christians, has only served to produce and spread the greatest and most deep-rooted prejudices against the Christian religion, and bar the way to that which is above all things desirable—their coming to the knowledge of the truth, that they might be saved.”50 Hopkins knew that the maltreatment Africans suffered at the hands of White Americans would only breed hate toward Christianity. Going further, Hopkins argued, No wonder they are unteachable and get no good by the gospel, but they have imbibed the deepest prejudices against it from the treatment they receive from professed Christians… And all the poor creatures learn of Christianity from what they see in those who call themselves Christians, only serves to prejudice them in the highest degree against the Christian religion…All I have said upon the slave trade to show the unrighteousness, the cruelty, the murder, the opposition to Christianity and the spread of the gospel among the Africans, the destruction of whole nations and myriads of souls which are contained in this horrid practice51

The horrors that Africans saw and experienced from American Christians would only grow deep prejudices toward Christianity and prevent any type of awakening among them. For Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and the rest of the New Divinity, slavery and the slave trade were not only incompatible with

48 49 50 51

WJEJ 2:93. WJEJ 2:94. WSH 2:557. WSH 2:556, 557, 559.

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Christianity, but was working against the Christian religion and inhibiting the oncoming millennium described by Jonathan Edwards.

5.4

Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, and Disinterested Benevolence

When comparing Jonathan Edwards’s views on slavery and slave trade to the New Divinity’s conviction of abolitionism side by side, one would think they have very little, if anything, in common. Moreover, how could these abolitionists be students who exonerated the teachings of their slave owning mentor? The aforementioned reasons as to why the New Divinity sought freedom for Africans stem from a foundational doctrine which is the link that connects Edwards to his abolitionist followers—the doctrine of disinterested benevolence.52 While all of Edwards’s students had this doctrine handed down to them, it impressed none of them as much as it did Hopkins. His practical interpretation of Edwards’s conception of virtue “presented Hopkins with opportunities to demonstrate his disinterested love of Being in general and to call for the reform of American society.”53 Here, I shall first look at Edwards’s Charity and it’s Fruits (1738) and Nature of True Virtue (1765) to understand his definition of benevolence, and secondly, look at Hopkins’s conception of it in his similar work, True Holiness (1773).54 In doing so, we shall see Edwards’s theological formulation of disin52 For other works on Hopkins and disinterested benevolence, see Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement, Chapter 6, “Disinterested Benevolence: A Theology of Social Reform,” 109–124; Oliver Wendell Elsbree, “Samuel Hopkins and His Doctrine of Benevolence,” The New England Quarterly 8, No. 4 (December 1935): 534–550. Hall, The Abolitionism of Samuel Hopkins, 303–313. 53 Conforti, Samuel Hopkins, 123. 54 Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue, WJE 8:539–627; Samuel Hopkins, True Holiness, WSH 3:5–138; For more information on Edwards and The Nature of True Virtue, see Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Virginia A. Peacock, Problems in the Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue, Studies in American Religion Series Vol. 47 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990); Stephen A. Wilson, Virtue Reformed: Rereading Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (Boston: Brill, 2005), “Jonathan Edwards’s Virtue: Diverse Sources, Multiple Meanings, and the Lessons of History for Ethics,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 31, No. 2 (Summer, 2003): 201–228; Richard B. Steele, Gracious Affection and True Virtue According to Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1994); William J. Danaher, Jr., “Beauty, Benevolence, and Virtue in Jonathan Edwards’s The Nature of True Virtue,” Journal of Religion 87 (2007): 386–410; Ki Joo Choi, “The Role of Perception in Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought: The Nature of True Virtue Reconsidered,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 38, No. 2 (June 2010): 269–296; William C. Spohn, “Union and Consent with the Great Whole: Jonathan Edwards on True Virtue,” The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 5 (1985): 19–32; Sovereign Beauty: Jonathan Edwards

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terested benevolence as it pertained to true virtue, and how Hopkins applied his interpretation as an ethical practice for abolitionism thus demonstrating why Edwards should be considered as the forerunner of antislavery thought in the New England theological tradition (even if he did not call for abolition outright as a slave owner). As his most devout student, Hopkins embodied the best representation of Edwards’s theological mind. In fact, he “spent much of his life in defending and applying this theory of virtue.”55 It was certainly most evident in both Edwards’s and Hopkins’s interest to distinguish true virtue, and religion, from the false. Edwards’s theory of virtue held God as the ultimate recipient of one’s benevolence, and Hopkins stressed the importance of demonstrating Edwards’s teaching by directing benevolence to God and all people—including Africans as equal recipients of Christian love. By directing benevolence toward all people, as well as God, Hopkins’s humanitarian application of Edwards’s doctrine led him to become a zealous abolitionist and patriot of American freedom.

5.4.1 Edwards on True Virtue and Disinterested Benevolence In his Religious Affections (1746), Edwards posed a question of “greater importance to mankind, ‘What is the nature of true religion?’”56 Namely, “what does it mean to be a true Christian?” The answer to this question permeated throughout Edwards’s writings, and one that would he would spend the rest of his life answering. His Religious Affections was written during the height of the Northampton revivals in the 1740’s; a time when distinguishing true religious conversion and affection from simply false enthusiasm was vital to defend the legitimacy of the Great Awakening against its opponents such as Charles

and the Nature of True Virtue,” Theological Studies 42, No. 3 (1981): 394–421; Roland A. Delattre, “The Theological Ethics of Jonathan Edwards an Homage to Paul Ramsey,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 19, No. 2, Special Focus Issue: The Ethics of Paul Ramsey (Fall, 1991): 71–102. Richard A.S. Hall, “The Religious Ethics of Edward Bellamy and Jonathan Edwards.” Utopian Studies Vol. 8, No. 2 (1997): 13–31. 55 WSH 1:218. There is a minor dispute which suggests that Hopkins is the one who instructed Edwards on the doctrine of benevolence. A Member of Hopkins’s congregation, William Ellery Channing, in Newport, RI believed that “President Edwards was a good deal indebted to Dr. Hopkins for his later views of religion, especially for those which we find in his essays on ‘Virtue,’ and on ‘God’s End in Creation.’… Dr. Hopkins had not the profound genius of Edwards, but was he not a man of a freer and bolder mind?” William H. Channing, ed. Memoir of William Ellery Channing, with Extracts from his Correspondence and Manuscripts. Vol. 1 4th ed. (Boston: Wm Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1850). 56 WJE 2:84.

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Chauncy.57 For Edwards, true religion and its affirmation resided in the greatest affection—love. He recounts, “The Scriptures do represent true religion, as being summarily comprehended in love.”58 Going on, he says, “Those affections that are truly holy, are primarily founded on the loveliness of moral excellency of divine things.”59 Love is not simply a representation of true religion, but it is also an action of benevolence toward the biblical goodwill toward others. To understand Edwards’s concept of virtue and benevolence and how it operates pertaining to slavery and race, it is vital to know how he both defined and used these terms. To begin, the foundation of how and what Edwards means by benevolence—or “benevolism” as McDermott and McClymond has coined it—is found in the opening chapter of Charity and Its Fruits entitled “Charity, or Love, the Sum of All Virtue.” Using 1 Corinthians 13:1–3, Edwards determined that “love, or that disposition or affection whereby one is dear to another; and the original (ἀγάπη), which is here translated “charity,” might better have been rendered “love.”60 From there Edwards brands charity (ἀγάπη) synonymous with showing love, or benevolence toward God. He further defines “that what is called charity in the first verse, is called loving God in the third, for the very same thing is

57 For an example of opponents of the Great Awakening questioning the legitimacy of religious conversion through examination of affection, see Charles Chauncy, Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against (Boston: J. Draper, 1742). For more information on “enthusiasm” in its religious context, see Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Michael Heyd, “The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an Integrative Approach,” in The Journal of Modern History 53, No. 2 (June 1981): 258–280; Lionel Laborie, Enlightening Enthusiasm: Prophecy and Religious Experience in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). For more information on Charles Chauncy, see Norman B. Gibbs, The Life and Thought of Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), ed. Lee W. Gibbs (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012); Charles H. Lippy, Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981); Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); John Corrigan, The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 58 WJE 2:106. 59 WJE 2:253. 60 Edwards, Charity and its Fruits, WJE 8:129. Edwards had composed fifteen different sermons in 1738 that make up Charity. 1 Cor. 13:1–3 (KJV), “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” McClymond and McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 533. McClymond and McDermott state that Edwards lived in an “world dominated by “benevolism”—the idea that human beings are naturally benevolent because of their altruism or “moral sense.” Edwards in opposition to this suggest that true, or the highest, virtue is divine and not natural to humans.

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evidently spoken of in the two places [in the passage].”61 For Edwards, charity is Christian love “whether it be exercised towards God or our fellow-creatures.”62 This particular love is not two different works by the Spirit brought by conversion, rather there is one “same divine temper thus wrought in the heart, that flows out in love to both God and man.”63 Therefore, Christian love, or charity, infused in a person by the Spirit will produce love to both God and fellow human beings. Writing in opposition to the moral sense theorists, such as Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), he affirmed this definition later in True Virtue: “It is abundantly plain by the Holy Scriptures, and generally allowed not only Christian divines but by the more considerable Deists, that virtue most essentially consist in love” and that “the general nature of true virtue is love.”64 Therefore, love is the centrifuge of true virtue, and true virtue is the essence of benevolence. Edwards’s benevolism consisted of two avenues; first and foremost was benevolence expressed to God, and the second was benevolence expressed to other human beings—neighbors. First, since Edwards thought that benevolence should be demonstrated toward the highest good, then it would naturally be shown to God as Being in general. As Elizabeth Agnew Cochran has pointed out, “Edwardsean virtues are best understood as representations of divine qualities,” and those such as virtue, love, benevolence, begin with God because they are essentially part of who God is and the source of any real virtue demonstrated toward others.65 “True virtue,” Edwards explains, “does primarily and most essentially consist in a supreme love to God; and that where this is wanting, there can be no virtue.”66 Therefore, it “consists in benevolence to “Being in general.”67 It is agreeable then, that Paul Ramsey suggests that Edwards’s benevolence as the “consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in general, that is immediately exercised in a general good will” is the sum definition.68 The moral sense theorists had a similar notions of benevolence, but thought all of humanity should be the chief recipient. For example, in Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), he suggests that “Love, or Benevolence, is the Foundation of all apprehended Excellence in social Virtues, let us only observe, That 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68

WJE 8:130. WJE 8:130. WJE 8:133. WJE 8:541, 609. For more information on Edwards and the moral sense theorists see Richard A.S. Hall, “Did Berkeley Influence Edwards? Their Common Critique of the Moral Sense Theory,” in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996), 100–121. Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues, 3. WJE 8:554. WJE 8:540. WJE 8:540.

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amidst the diversity of Sentiments on this Head among various Sects, this is still allow’d to be the way of deciding the Controversy about any disputed Practice, to enquire whether this Conduct, or the contrary, will most effectually promote the publick Good.”69 So for moral sense theorists like Hutchenson, benevolence is not the underlying foundation for virtue, nor is it proper of God’s being, but instead external qualities. But for Edwards, benevolence will and rightly be directed toward the pinnacle and source of all moral excellency—God himself. Contrary to moral sense theorists, Edwards, clarified that, “[T]he primary object of virtuous love is Being, simply considered; or that true virtue primarily consists, not in love to any particular beings, because of their virture or beauty, nor in gratitude, because they love us; but in a propensity and union of heart to Being simply considered; exciting “absolute Benevolence” (if I may so call it) to being in general.70 This disinterested benevolence is predicated that it is not motivated by selfinterest, rather its interest is concern for the maximum, or highest, good of all beings. It is also important, as Richard Hall notes, Edwards’s conception of benevolence “is much broader than that of the moral sense theorists. It encompasses not only humanity as its proper object, but God and angels, as well as the whole of animate nature.”71 While this broad scope includes everything in the chain of being, God remains at the highest, and therefore, is due one’s benevolence before and above anything in the created order. Second, even if Edwards intentionally downplayed benevolence toward “neighbors” in order to elevate the position of Being in general, as some scholars have suggested, he was still very clear that the disposition of benevolence should also be extended to them. Edwards stated, “If men have a sincere love to their neighbours, it will dispose them to all acts of justice towards those neighbours— for real love and friendship always dispose us to give those we love their due, and never to wrong them (Rom. Xiii. 10)—‘Love worketh no ill to his neighbor.’”72 Moreover, Edwards’s disinterested benevolence coincided with Matthew 7:12 (commonly called the “golden rule”) which he was referring to: “For real and dear love will dispose men to high thoughts of them; and Christian love disposes men to think other better than themselves. Love will dispose men to honor one another.”73 Applying this virtue, he offered examples of what it would look like in different relationships. Specifically, on the master-slave relationship, Edwards 69 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, (London, 1725). 70 WJE 8:544. 71 Hall, “The Abolitionism of Samuel Hopkins,” 305. 72 WJE 8:135. 73 WJE 8:135. Matthew 7:12, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”

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explained, “Love would dispose to those duties which they owe one another in their several places and relations… servants to be obedient to their masters to exercise gentleness and goodness towards their servants.”74 Servants, or slaves, were still considered neighbors and were included as persons worthy of benevolence. For slaves to show benevolence toward their masters, they were obligated to obey them in love, and the masters showed them benevolence by treating them with gentleness and goodness. He reiterates this in True Virtue after considering that benevolence should be sought to the “highest good of Being in general” and that it should also “seek the good of every individual being unless it conceived as not consistent with the highest good of Being in general.”75 This disinterested benevolence was not only meant to be shown to God—but it was also meant for Christians to show “ἀγάπη,” or to seek the welfare, of every individual person without reserve. Edwards did not make a contradistinction in his doctrine of benevolence— that is, juxtaposing outworking’s of virtue to God and to humans as separate qualities—rather he viewed them as a casual behavior in the Christian life. Namely, the love (ἀγάπη) of Spirit dwelling within a Christian will show benevolence to Being in general (God) as the source, and will in turn show benevolence to all human beings. One could not exist without the other. His doctrine remained highly theocentric insofar as the greatest affection, that is love, was to be used a virtue to demonstrate disinterested benevolence to the highest object which is God. If one demonstrated a sincere love toward God, it would naturally cause them to demonstrate benevolence toward other human beings. But for Edwards, first and foremost, was that benevolence should first be due to God.

5.4.2 Hopkins on True Holiness and Disinterested Benevolence Samuel Hopkins was in complete agreement with Edwards in his doctrine of disinterested benevolence, however, the implications he drew would make his views on slavery much different. Edwards’s notions of love and virtue were ripe for Hopkins to contest slavery, and by believing he was only explaining Edwards more fully, Hopkins declared virtue was acknowledged by one’s “love to God and our neighbor.”76 Hopkins’s argument in his True Holiness was nearly identical to the one in Edwards’s True Virtue, however, Hopkin’s intentions were to expound on Edwards given the criticisms True Virtue received from the moral sense theorists and opponents of Edwardsianism such was William Hart’s Remarks on 74 WJE 8:136. 75 WJE 8:545. 76 WSH 3:380. Emphasis added.

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President Edwards’s Dissertation concerning the Nature of True Virtue (1771).77 While both Edwards’s and Hopkins’s works sought to distinguish true religion from the false, and how basic Christian behavior should function, Hopkins simply traded the word virtue for holiness. Like Edwards, Hopkins argued that the true Christian life was marked by how they displayed love. Hopkins swapped the words virtue and holiness because he saw the “law of God” as “the standard of all moral rectitude or holiness.”78 His interpretation turned Edwards’s virtue into a religious ethic—holiness. After quoting Matthew 22:37–40, Hopkins argued, “Here all obedience to the law of God is reduced to one thing—love; love to God and our neighbor, including ourselves. This is the whole that is required; therefore, this is the whole of true holiness; it consists in this love, and in nothing else.”79 Again, going in the same theological direction as Edwards, he came to the same conclusions about benevolence: Love has been usually distinguished into love of benevolence, or good will, love of complacence, or delight, love of esteem, and love of gratitude. The love of benevolence is good will to beings capable of good, or happiness, and consists in desiring and pursuing their good, or rejoicing in their possessing it. By benevolence is, I suppose, most commonly meant that good will which is exercised towards other beings, in distinction from self-love.80

Hopkins agreed with Edwards that “universal benevolence” should be oriented to God, the “the highest happiness,” “the true good,” and “highest good of the whole,” as the pinnacle object.81 And like Edwards, he also concluded that benevolence toward God would cause one to demonstrate it to other intelligent beings as well. “St. John teaches us,” Hopkins argued, “that love to God and to our brother or neighbor is inseparable; that he who loves one of these, certainly and necessarily loves the other.”82 Moreover, both of their benevolisms were disinterested—seeking the good will and interests of other intelligent beings before self-love; those who love themselves “only exercise good will towards themselves.” Instead, benevolence should cause one to seek in “wishing well to others” so that they “taste and relish for the good of others, as theirs, and a delight in it when they are seen possessed of it.”83

77 William Hart, Remarks on President Edwards’s Dissertation concerning the Nature of True Virtue (New Haven, CT: T. and S. GREEN, 1771). 78 WSH 3:13. 79 WSH 3:14. 80 WSH 3:15. 81 WSH 3:17; 35. 82 WSH 3:35. 83 WSH 3:15.

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The point of contention where Hopkins and Edwards differed was with their notions of “Being in general.” Whereas Edwards denoted Being in general as God as the head of a system and as a “comprehensive ontological reality, and true virtue as an aesthetic perception of this universal being,” Hopkins went further and interpreted his idea as a socio-religious ethic that could be manifested among “God and our neighbors.”84 By rejecting any type of self-love and promoting the utmost disinterested sort of benevolence, Hopkins presented a very strict doctrine leaving no middle ground. Which meant his theological mentality assumed every approach in the Christian life should be vested in the interest of others, and any type of self-motivation for one’s own happiness was rooted in sin. So, Hopkins suggested that “the love to our neighbor, which God’s law requires, is certainly universal, disinterested good will, since it is a love which will dispose us to do good unto all men.”85 By expanding Edwards’s definition of true virtue— extending benevolence toward, not only the head of Being in general, but to the entire system of being—Hopkins saw no other way than to apply this as an ethic toward those oppressed in bondage. Applying his new, expanded definition of benevolence, Hopkins’s abolitionism became the practical implication he found rooted in Edwards’s teaching. Hopkins read Edwards’s “Being in general” as “God and our neighbors,” and thus making a humanitarian perspective on the doctrine. The most obvious way—at least to Hopkins and the New Divinity—to demonstrate their disinterested benevolence was to help Africans by promoting their freedom from slavery and equality with Whites. Because this new definition included Africans as neighbors meant they should be equal recipients in benevolence. Logically, then, disinterested benevolence concerning slavery would cause masters to free their slaves from such a harsh station. He argued, “The following precept of our Lord and Savior, ‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them,’ which is included in loving our neighbor as ourselves, will set at liberty every slave.”86 While both Edwards and Hopkins had similar theologies of love, it was Hopkins who had suffered public ridicule for his views. Park records that “the opposers of Dr. Hopkins have supposed him to be devoid of mental versatility” and that “he also subjected himself to more of personal suffering, than did the great majority of those who assailed the slave system… He sacrificed property and immediate reputation. He was ridiculed and hated by many of his townsmen.”87 Nevertheless, the fruit of Hopkins’s evangelization efforts to the slaves 84 85 86 87

Conforti, Samuel Hopkins, 117. WSH 3:35. WSH 2:601. WSH 1:38; 161.

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came on 5 May 1801, when he helped form the Missionary Society of Rhode Island and served as its first president. At its nexus, the society was “to promote the gospel in any part of the State where there may by opportunity for it and to assist Africans in coming to a knowledge of the truth in any way which may consist with our means and advantages.”88 Hopkins believed that by crusading for the freedom of African Slaves he was living out his doctrine of disinterested benevolence and fulfilling the greatest biblical commandment in Matt 22:36–39.89

5.5

Conclusion

Other than attempting to explain his mentor to contemporary critics, Hopkins’s charge was to abolish slavery in order to end the unbiblical treatment of Africans, so they might convert to Christianity. His intentions were never to abolish slavery simply for its own sake, but to take away any hurdle that might prevent Africans from criticizing Christianity for its behavior toward their fellow human beings. For Edwards, disinterested benevolence and slavery could coexist, so he did not see any reason to argue against slavery as a system itself. The three main ways that Hopkins built upon Edwards theology were: first, he expanded Edwards’s notion of “Being in general” to, not only God as the head of the system, but to all intelligent beings within that system. This expanded definition allowed disinterested benevolence to become inclusive rather than exclusive, and took Edwards’s orientation of love aimed at God and broadened it to the general system of being to include all living things. For Edwards, strictly speaking, a person’s chief end was to glorify (which includes demonstrating benevolence) to God, because if that was not first, nothing else virtuous would follow. Hopkins, however, thought that loving other beings is an example of how you show benevolence to God because they were part of that system. Secondly, Hopkins constructed a way to connect virtue and holiness. He took Edwards’s ethical term and made it synonymous with a religious one. To have true virtue was to not only be engrossed with love and caught up in the glory of God, but to display the glory of God by showing love to others—for Hopkins, that was the “whole” of true holiness. Thirdly, Hopkins found a way to become a humanitarian without becoming a humanist and giving up his Calvinism. The humanists wanted to commend self-love and loving others as a separate and mutually exclusive thing. Hopkins thought that exclusive self-love was evil, but when a being loves others as themselves, they are showing benevolence to the system of 88 Oliver Wendell Elsbree, The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America, 1790–1815 (Porcupine Press, 1980), 66. 89 WSH 3:13.

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being because they are also part of it. He was not a bipartisan figure trying to appease humanists and keep in step with Edwardsean tradition, nor was he trying to break from Edwards’s theology. Hopkins was able to explain Edwards’s doctrine in such a way that helped the African slaves and simultaneously still hold fast to his inherited Calvinism. Some scholars, like Conforti, suggest that Edwards would not have recognized Hopkins’s concept of Being in general, or his Calvinism, and in turn disagreed with it.90 But after examining how both men understood the biblical view of “neighbor,” Edwards would have approved with how Hopkins built upon his doctrine. As seen in Edwards’s Draft Letter on Slavery, his biblical exegesis defines of neighbor as all of humankind which is identical to Hopkins. Both would have agreed that Whites, Africans, Native Americans, and other peoples are all neighbors, and deserving of benevolence as participants in Being in general. It is also by the same biblical definition of neighbor that both ministers denounced the slave trade for its unbenevolent actions toward other humans, and counter productivity of converting Africans. In the end, both Edwards and Hopkins counted African slaves as neighbors and retained a theocentric view of virtue and holiness—they both stressed the importance of benevolence toward God; Edwards directly to God, and Hopkins to God by serving others. The New Divinity thought that one could offer either destruction or benevolence toward their fellow human being. Slavery, therefore, was the exemplar of destruction and abolition was a demonstration of benevolence. Examining the connection between Edwards and the New Divinity not only challenges the historical assumption that all elite Whites were either pro-slave racists, or abolitionists, but it also reveals that Edwards (while a slaver holder) is credited for providing the necessary theological foundation Hopkins and the New Divinity needed to become abolitionists.

90 Conforti, Samuel Hopkins, 110.

Daniel N. Gullotta (Stanford University)*

“By Magick and a Familiarity with the Devil” Constructing Witchcraft in Enlightenment Colonial New England and in the Mind of Jonathan Edwards

The witchcraft trials of the early modern period saw the deaths of thousands of innocent people. These people were executed for a crime that most historians view as the product of intolerant religious beliefs, eccentric superstition, distain for those on the fringes of society, and blatant sexism. Yet the dawning of the eighteenth century saw a dramatic decrease and eventual end to witchcraft trials. This important shift in events has given historians ample reason for investigation. Traditionally, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution have been cited as the two major catalysis for change in early modern Europe’s attitudes toward witchcraft. For example, according to Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, an enlightenment document par excellence, (1764), the witch trials were “enormous crimes, formally committed … legal murders committed by indolence, stupidity, and superstition.”1 As a product of the Enlightenment, it is not surprising witches are a rare feature within Jonathan Edwards’ writings. But it is noteworthy that Edwards was raised in the shadow of the Salem witch trials, born eleven years after and just over one hundred miles away from the infamous outbreak of witchcraft accusations across Salem Village, Salem Town, Ipswich, and Andover. While witch hunting has received considerable attention over the years, most historians have argued that the events of Salem marked the beginning of the end for witch hunting in the New World. With the dawning of the 18th century, scholars have assumed that debate over the existence of witches was coming to a close.2 It would * The author is indebted to the council of Kenneth P. Minkema in the formation of this essay. He is also grateful to the feedback that was given to him during the 2018 Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture conference. He is indebted to the professionalism, patience, and friendship of John T. Lowe in the editing of this volume. 1 Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary: From the French, vol. 6 (London: Printed by John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824), 76. 2 For example: “The 18th century brought a gradual decline in the strength and salience of witchcraft belief,” in John Demos, The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World (New York: Viking, 2008), 241; “By the end of the [18th] century, witchcraft had become a topic of historical rather than contemporary interest,” in Alan Charles Kors and

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seem that most historians would agree with William Burke’s 1757 assessment that the Salem witch trials were “the last paroxysm of puritanic enthusiasm in New England.”3 Thus Edwards and the ministers of his generation, supposedly silent on the subject of witchcraft, have been viewed as products of a more “enlightened” era and embarrassed over their predecessor’s actions. As I will demonstrate, this narrative is both overly simplistic and incomplete. Belief in witches and witchcraft was alive and well during Edwards’ generation.4 While Edwards never encouraged or partook in witch-hunts or extensively wrote about witchcraft, it is notable that Edwards never criticized it either. Despite being surrounded by witchcraft trials and texts, Edwards’ lack of interest in the subject, notwithstanding his few reflections, reveals the changing climate of the early eighteenth century. Notwithstanding living in the so-called age of Enlightenment, witches and witchcraft were a real and dangerous phenomenon to Edwards, rare but powerful tools that Satan could use to his diabolical advantage. Ultimately, it is my goal is to use Jonathan Edwards as a model within the early eighteenth century colonial British American and wider Atlantic landscape to show that belief in witchcraft did not erode; it merely mutated.

6.1

New Histography on the End of the Witch Trials and the Enlightenment

Emerging in the early twentieth century, the work of German scholar Joseph Hansen came to dominate the field of witchcraft for his collection of witch hunting texts, interpretive power, and knowledge of medieval and early modern magical practices. In 1900, Hansen published his classic Zauberwahn, Inquisition, und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung. In Hansen’s work, he expounds the triumphalist narrative of the Enlightenment, arguing that the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventh centuries were “nothing but the natural dying out of the medieval spirit, which the Reformation only partially pushed aside in this matter hardly even touched.”5 While Hansen focused primarily on witch hunting texts such as the Malleus Maleficarum, Compendium Maleficarum and Daemonologie, as well as the Edwards Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History, revised by Edwards Peters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 392. 3 William Burke, An account of the European settlements in America, vol. 2. London, MDCCLVII [1757], 155. 4 For examples, see: Owen Davies, America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–21. 5 Joseph Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition, und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 1900), 4.

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practices of the Spanish Inquisition and other professional witch hunters, he did also account for the decline in witch trials. He attributed their downfall to the Enlightenment, claiming that it was thanks to “the influence of a modern worldview based on science, and not theology.”6 Thanks to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Hansen and the many he influenced mapped a continuous march of progress from the end of the Middle Ages to the dawning of the eighteenth century onwards. Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper of Oxford University provided one of the last texts that boasted so proudly of the Enlightenment’s achievements, continuing the traditional framework which pitted religion against magic, the unenlightened medieval to the enlightened early modern. After years of research and smaller publications, Trevor-Roper published his monograph The European WitchCraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries in 1969. Trevor-Roper described the witch hunts as the manifestation of social intolerance. Using Jews as a parallel, marginalized identity group (a practice that became popular following the Holocaust), Trevor-Roper described the witch as a figure who did not confirm to the norms of feudal society and thus became a victim of conflicting ideology and an easy scapegoat.7 Given that Trevor-Rope was primarily a historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, his comparisons of Jews and witches as social pariahs is understandable.8 His personal correspondence with Alan MacFarlane (a future witchcraft historian) reveals that he regarded witch hunters and Nazis as more or less the same, people with “crooked minds” in need of enlightenment.9 One of the most important studies within the twentieth century on European witchcraft was Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).10 Thomas’s central argument revolves around the shifting interactions between religion and magic, and the emergent rationalism that displaced magic and tempered religious belief. Thomas’s definitions of religion and magic draw heavily from the work of the Polish anthropologist, Bronisław Malinowski.11 Like 6 Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition, und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung, 6. 7 Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 16–18. 8 For more on the trend of comparing witch hunts to the Holocaust, see Wolfgang Behringer, “Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, ed. By Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 64–95. 9 Ricard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman, ed., “To Alan MacFarlane, 22 January 1967,” One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 135–139. 10 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; rpt London: Penguin Books, 2001). 11 For references to Malinowski throughout Thomas’s work, see: Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 774–5, 785, 799.

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Malinowski, Thomas views “magic” as a loose collection of practices intended to effect practical results in specific events of fortune and misfortune. The purpose of magic is a social function, designed and employed by its practitioners to “lessen their own anxiety” about the world around them.12 Because the premodern landscape was full of diseases, unexpected tragedies, and strange environmental phenomena, magic was used as a means to grapple with these forces. In other words, magic was a social tool by which people attempted to explain the unexplainable and control the uncontrollable. Likewise, Thomas asserted that pre-modern people employed “religion” as a social tool to explain and engage the world, but unlike magic, religion operated within well-defined beliefs and practices.13 Whereas magic was understood to be individualistic, unsystematic and incoherent, religion was viewed as communal, systematic and coherent.14 Thomas also argues that religion offered moralistic explanations for the human misfortunate (typically individual or collective sin), which allowed the ruling clergy and elites to place moral expectations upon people, and thus assured the maintenance of society. But while magic and religion were opposing forces for Thomas, they were also intimately linked by a process in which magical practices were co-opted by religious institutions, such as holy relics, house blessings, icons of the saints, exorcisms of demons, etc. This shared space created a blurry relationship between religion and magic throughout the medieval period, but eventually this distinction became clearer in the early modern period. Beginning with the Protestant Reformation, more enlightened and rational thinkers began to attack the rites of the Catholic Church as a form of “sacramental magic” and its practices as superstitions. The Reformers created a new cultural sphere that diminished magic, not just as a false form of religion, but as a “different sort of activity altogether.”15 According to Thomas, the setting of the seventeenth century ushered in the beginnings of modern rationalism, paving the way to the English Enlightenment. Thanks to the efforts of Enlightenment thinkers, “The Devil was banished to Hell, God himself was confined to working through natural cause.”16 The decline of magic ushered in an enlightened view of the world, which understood everything to be a part of an “orderly and rational universe in which effect follows cause in predictable manner.”17 In sum, “the

12 13 14 15 16 17

Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Thomas, Religion and the Decline of

Magic, 317. Magic, 136. Magic, 874. Magic, 88. Magic, 117. Magic, 786.

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disenchantment of the world” culminated with the onset of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.18 Appearing on the academic stage around the same time as Religion and the Decline of Magic was Alan MacFarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (1970). Thomas supervised MacFarlane’s work on English witchcraft at St. John’s College in Oxford University, and Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England was a modified version of MacFarlane’s 1967 D.Phil. thesis.19 Like his mentor, MacFarlane employed an anthropologic model to understand the phenomenon of witchcraft in England. MacFarlane’s study, however, centered primarily on the nature of witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions, rather than practices. While older scholarship had simply dismissed witchcraft accusations as superstitious fears, MacFarlane argued for a socio-economic motive behind these charges. MacFarlane contends that the early modern period introduced villages and towns all over Europe to new concepts of privacy and property, as well as a tremendous growth in population.20 Because of these factors, people became more protective of their economic goods and less inclined to charity.21 This made the vulnerable of society even more vulnerable, and even more resentful of their ‘betters.’ This brings forth MacFarlane’s most significant insight: that the vast majority of witch trials centered on people who knew each other personally as neighbors and the condemned were from the lowest ranks of society. Thus, any sort of hostility from these marginal figures (such as cursing, angry glares, violent gestures, etc.) could be used as evidence of ‘maleficium.’22 To explain the decline of witch trials in the eighteenth century, MacFarlane asserts that it was the growing confidence in humanity’s “ability to control and understand the world” that stopped belief in witches.23 But in recent years, historians have focused their attention on whether or not the Enlightenment can be credited for the reduction in witch hunts and executions. Sönke Lorenz and Dieter R. Bauer organized the first international conference on witchcraft studies in 1985, and across the annual meetings, invited budding scholars to present on a range of topics. The theme of the 1989 conference was “The End of Witchcraft Persecutions,” which generated numerous papers challenging the success of the Enlightenment in ending witch hunts and

18 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 508. 19 Alan MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge, 1970; rpt London: Routledge, 1999), Acknowledgments. 20 MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 107–109. 21 MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 197. 22 MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 201–213. 23 MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 270.

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belief in magic.24 Some of these papers were published in 1995 in Sönke Lorenz and Dieter R. Bauer’s edited collection Das Ende der Hexevnverglogoung.25 What these scholars stress is that, while various European states did indeed decriminalize witchcraft during the eighteenth century and cease to put people on trial, this did not mean that belief in witchcraft had subsided amongst the masses. One of the leading scholars driving this historiographic turn is Brian P. Levack of the University of Texas at Austin. Zeroing in on Scotland, Levack’s research has focused on the overlooked legal element of witchcraft history, highlighting the ways evidence, testimony, witnessing, and punishing witches changed throughout the centuries.26 In studying the progression of witch trials throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Levack argues that it was legal reform, not intellectual growth, that caused the decline in witch hunts. He bases this argument on a close examination of trial records, noting how judges became more and more reluctant to try people for witchcraft and that the evidence required to prove witchcraft became more complicated.27 Furthermore, Levack notes that the earliest anti-witchcraft pamphlets were written from a legal framework (as opposed to a theological one) and stressed the injustice of witchcraft trials.28 For Levack, the decline of witch hunts in the eighteenth century was a legal triumph made by countless victims and penal reformers, not intellectuals or philosophers. Another pioneer in this field is Owen Davies of the University of Hertfordshire, who has invited historians to rethink the narrative of witchcraft’s ‘decline’ in the eighteenth century. After extensive archival research across Europe and the United States, Davies uncovered a score of new documents and resources demonstrating the ongoing belief in magic and witchcraft throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.29 Davies’s discoveries proved that the masses still believed in witchcraft, as accusations remained present in society but the reduction in witch hunts and convictions demonstrated the legal system’s growing reluctance to convict persons of witchcraft.30 Davies demonstrates that, despite the best attempts of the “rational thinkers” to counter belief in magic and witchcraft, “ordinary Europeans went on thinking

24 Behringer, “Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland,” 72. 25 Sönke Lorenz and Dieter R. Bauer, ed., Das Ende der Hexenverfolgung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995). 26 Brian P. Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion (London: Routledge, 2007). 27 Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 131–144. 28 Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 145–150. 29 Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 30 Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 34, 49, 83–89.

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and acting in terms of maleficium.”31 Within the United States, the witchcraft laws were not so much removed as replaced. Witchcraft went from being a criminal offense of treating with the Devil to a civil offense of committing fraud by way of claiming to perform witchery in general.32 As late as the early twentieth century, individuals were still being charged with witchcraft simply because the average citizen didn’t differentiate between the defunct crime of “being a witch” and fraudulent crime of “claiming to be a witch.”33 Davies has also drawn together other scholars to encourage furthering these investigations into eighteenth-century witchcraft with edited volumes such as Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe (2004) and Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (2005).34 Similar to how scholars have challenged the idea that the Enlightenment was some monolithic school of thought, historians of witchcraft have also rejected the idea that the rationalists typically associated with Enlightenment thought universally rejected magical thinking and the existence of witches. This is particularly emphasized by scholars who have uncovered that Enlightenment figures such as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and John Locke had connections to the occult.35 These scholars highlight the complex range of beliefs that were held by various intellectuals of the eighteenth century, nothing how some could still support a Lockean worldview and maintain a belief in witches, or criticize the existence of magic but still use astrology to interpret meaning into their lives.36 Paul Kléber Monod of Middlebury College’s Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment is a recent example of this challenge to the triumphalist Enlightenment paradigm. While an old scholarly trope was to blame the “uneducated masses” for witch hunts and belief in magic, Monod demon31 Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, ed., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 5: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ix. 32 Davies, America Bewitched, 132–148. 33 Davies, America Bewitched, 25. 34 Owen Davies and Willem De Blécourt, ed., Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Owen Davies and Willem De Blécourt, ed., Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 35 For examples, see Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Glen Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2014); John V. Fleming, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013); Margaret C. Jacobs, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in EighteenthCentury Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 36 Ian Bostridge, “Witchcraft Repealed,” in Witchcraft in the British Isles and New England, Vol. 3: New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, ed. Brian P. Levack (New York: Routledge, 2001), 316.

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strates that educated men, such as scientists, doctors, and politicians, were vocal supporters of witch trials and avid defenders of them, despite their waning appeal throughout the eighteenth century.37 Richard Boulton, the author of A Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft (1715) and defender of witch hunts, was an Oxford-educated physician, and his critic, Francis Hutchinson, author of An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), was a Cambridge-educated Bishop of the Church of England. Monod argues that historians have “overstated the differences” between the two of them and contends that Boulton and Hutchinson represent a debate within the Enlightenment, not outside of it.38 With this historiographical turn in mind, I will now re-contextualize the world Enlightenment New England and Jonathan Edwards’ place is within it.

6.2

The Ongoing Witchcraft Debates and Trials in the British-American Colonies

Only one year before Edwards was born (1702), the Connecticut Colony’s Acts and Laws clearly stated that “If any Man or Woman be a Witch, that is, hath, or consulteth with a Familiar Spirit, they shall be put to death.”39 In typical fashion, it cited Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 20:27, Deuteronomy 18:11 for biblical support for this law. Massachusetts continued to treat witchcraft as worthy of capital punishment, likewise citing “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live (Exod. 22:18).”40 Invoking evil spirits became formally against the law in South Carolina in 1712 and Pennsylvania in 1718.41 And, in 1728, the Rhode Island legislators specified, “That Witchcraft is, and shall be Felony; and whosoever shall be lawfully convicted therefore, shall suffer the Pains of Death.”42 Beyond the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which twenty people were executed for witchcraft, reprimand for supposed witches continued in New England into the eighteenth century.43 While witch trials and executions were becoming rarer 37 Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 121–150. 38 Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 82. 39 Acts and laws, of His Majesties colony of Connecticut in New-England (Boston: Printed by Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1702), 12. 40 The general laws and liberties of the Massachusets colony: revised & re-printed, by order of the General Court holden at Boston. May 15th. 1672. Edward Rawson secr. (Cambridge: Printed by Samuel Green for John Usher of Boston, 1672), 14. 41 See: Davies, America Bewitched, 45–47. 42 Acts and laws, of His Majesty’s colony of Rhode-Island, and Providence-Plantations, in NewEngland, in America (Newport, Rhode-Island: Printed by the Widow Franklin, and to be sold at the town school-house., M,DCC,XLV. [1745]), 116. 43 For more on the Salem witch trials and its aftermath in the 18th century, see Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (Oxford: Oxford

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phenomena in the early eighteenth century, they nonetheless remained prominent events in colonial society.44 Outside of New York in 1737, an old woman was drowned by her village for being a witch.45 Sometime in the mid-1740’s, one of William Johnson’s correspondences reported of a “cart Loade of Old Dutch People” who were being charged with witchcraft. A Woodbury woman in the 1750s, Moll Crammer, was declared a witch with a “familiarly with Satan.”46 She was cast out of her home by her husband, and spent the rest of her days begging and living in a ramshackle hut on Grassy Hill. Beyond New England, in 1706, Grace Sherwood of Pungo, Virginia, was convicted of witchcraft and was incarcerated until 1714.47 In Illinois (then a county of Virginia), a slave named Manuel was burnt to death for witchcraft on June 19, 1771.48 Despite the fact no event like Salem occurred within the British American colonies after 1692, Richard Weisman rightly notes, “The decline of witchcraft prosecutions by no means coincided with the decline of accusations.”49 For example, the Maryland Provincial Court in 1712 indicted Virtue Violl of Talbot County for bewitching Ellinore More, turning her into a mute, although Virtue was acquitted.50 In 1718, a man accused his mother of witchcraft before the church in Milton, Massachusetts, but his accusation was rejected on the grounds he had broken the fifth, sixth, and ninth commandments.51 Reverend Turell of

44

45

46 47 48 49 50 51

University Press, 2014); Gretchen A. Adams, The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Ninetieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008), 10–36; Eve LaPlante, Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall (New York: HarperOne, 2007). For an in-depth study of witchcraft within the eighteenth-century British-American colonies, see: Hebert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 66–125; Davies, America Bewitched, 67–99. “Extract of a Letter About the Tyral of a Witch,” in Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg, VA. January 20, 1737): 1.; “Extract of a Letter About the Tryal of a Witch. Oakely, Three Miles from Bedford,” in Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia, PA. November 21, 1737): 2; “Extract of a Letter About the Tyral of a Witch,” in New-York Weekly Journal (New York, NY. December 12, 1737): 25. William Cothren, History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut: From the First Indian Deed in 1659 to 1854, vol. 1 (Waterbury: Published by Bronson Brothers, 1854), 160. Also see: Peter C. Vermilyea, Wicked Litchfield County (Charleston: The History Press, 2016), 20–22. See Richard B. Davis, “The Devil in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65 (1957): 146–147. See William H. Perrin, ed. History of Crawford and Clark Counties, Illinois (Chicago: O. L. Baskin & Co., 1883), 38. Richard Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 182. See Francis Neale Parke, “Witchcraft in Maryland,” in Maryland Historical Magazine 31.4 (1936): 287–291. See Emile Oberholzer, Jr., Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in the Early Congregational Churches of Massachusetts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 75.

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Milford reported that, in 1720, a small group of children claimed to be afflicted by a local woman who had recently died and made “a covenant with the devil.” While the children’s accusation excited the community, Turell did not believe their testimony.52 Sarah Spencer of Colchester, Connecticut, was accused by Elizabeth Ackley in 1723 of being a witch and of “riding and pinching.” Spencer returned the charges with a lawsuit on the grounds of defamation, and the magistrates even questioned the sanity of Ackley, though she received a formal acknowledgement that she was not insane.53 Martha Roberson of Boston in 1741 claimed that she was possessed by the Devil.54 As late as 1785, Thomas Goss in Litchfield, Connecticut, was executed for the murder of his wife, claiming that she had been witch.55 These actions, while they were rejected and sometimes condemned by courts, establish that the belief in witches and the power of Satan continued within the eighteenth century, although it encountered a growing skepticism. But this skepticism was directed primarily toward the evidence which accusers had brought forth against the supposed witch.56 Judges and magistrates still used leading questions throughout interrogations.57 It is not that these judges denied the existence of witches or the reality of witchcraft, but what changed was their standards of evidence.58 Even though witchcraft became increasingly more difficult to prove throughout the eighteenth century, it was still considered a real crime. This increasing uncertainty about witchcraft, however, was directed at the nature of witch trials and hunts, not necessary on whether or not witches existed. 52 Ebenezer Turell, “Detection of Witchcraft,” Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 10 (1823): 1–17. 53 See John M. Taylor, The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut, 1647–1697 (New York: The Grafton Press, 1908), 155. 54 See Kenneth P. Minkema, ““The Devil Will Roar in Me Anon”: The Possession of Martha Roberson, Boston, 1741,” in Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America, ed. Elizabeth Reis (Lanham: SR Books, 1998): 99–120; Douglas L. Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2017), 210–213. 55 John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections: Containing a General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, & c. Relating to the History and Antiquities of Every Town in Connecticut with Geographical Descriptions (New Haven: Printed by I. Hamlen, 1836), 459. 56 Brian P. Levack, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions,” in The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 5: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), 7–32. 57 Davies, America Bewitched, 13–16; Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 33–37. 58 See Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); W. M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117–119.

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An important example of this is John Hale, the minister of the Church of Christ in Beverly, Massachusetts, who published A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft.59 Hale witnessed the events of Salem in 1692, accusing Sarah Bishop of using “some extraordinary work of the devil or witchcraft” against the deceased Goody Trask.60 Although Hale initially showed enthusiasm for the trials, he withdrew his support after his wife Sarah was accused.61 Notwithstanding, Hale’s change of heart over the trials did not alter his belief in witches and witchcraft; far from it. As a clergyman, Hale’s text offered his advice on “how persons guilty of that crime may be convicted.”62 Hale aimed to reform witchcraft trials, not abolish them. Hale did not blame the people of Salem for the witch-hunts but rather Satan. Because the Devil was believed to have the power to “darken the minds of some pious souls,” what had occurred in Salem and Andover was that Satan had besieged the village. Hale believed that Satan had conducted spiritual warfare among the villagers by making neighbors accuse one another, which thus resulted in the false confessions and hangings of innocent people. They were all “grievously vexed with the Devil” and failed to see that it was Satan behind the witchcraft panic.63 Eventually, through prayer, God delivered them from the chaotic clutches of Satan. Hale’s A Modest Enquiry anticipated more witchcraft trials in the future, and hoped to see them conducted “In the same way that Murder, Theft, and such like crimes are provable.”64 More exceptional was the work of Robert Calef, a Boston cloth merchant. In 1700, Calef published More Wonders of the Invisible World, a clear play on Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World. Calef had attended the session in which Cotton Mather examined Margaret Rule for bewitchment. Calef accused Mather of abusing his authority to inappropriately touch the girl, claiming he “rubbed her stomach (her breast not covered with the bed-clothes) and bid others to do so too, and said it eased her… Then again she [Rule] was in a fit, and he again rubbed her breast.”65 Ultimately, Calef presents Mather as a sexual pervert and a 59 John Hale, A modest enquiry into the nature of witchcraft, (Boston in N. E. Printed By B. Green and J. Allen, for Benjamin Elliot under the Town House, 1702). 60 “The Rev. John Hale et al. v. Sarah Bishop,” in Essex County Archives reproduced in the Salem Witchcraft Papers, vol. 1, eds. Benjamin C. Ray and Tara S. Wood (University of Virginia, 2003), 39. 61 For more on the accusations against Sarah Hale for witchcraft, see Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege (Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2002), 331. 62 John Hale, A modest enquiry into the nature of witchcraft, 1. 63 Hale, A modest enquiry into the nature of witchcraft, 39. 64 Hale, A modest enquiry into the nature of witchcraft, 162. 65 Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, or the Wonders of the Invisible World, Display’d in Five Parts (London: Printed for Nath. Hillar, at the Princess-Arms, in Leaden-

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paranoid fool who stupidly believed the Salem community was “beset by devils and torn by the unseen power of Satan forces.”66 Like Hale, Calef did not reject the power of Satan, but he went further and claimed that the common understanding of witches and witchcraft was unscriptural. Calef rhetorically argued that if God had not created the witches of the Puritan imagination, but witches did indeed exist, this meant that God was not in control of Nature. This implied Satan was in control, or at least it meant Satan was God’s equal, a belief he knew would be untenable to the Mathers and their supporters.67 What Calef reasoned was that “As long as the Devil shall be believed to have a Natural Power, to Act above and against a course of Nature… Innocent will suffer as Witches.”68 Calef believed Satan was powerful, but only so much as he could influence sinners to be sinful, not manipulate the natural world. To him, the tragedy of Salem had occurred because “lying wenches” who were driven by “the devils” of “envy, hatred, pride, cruelty, and malice,” accused “innocent neighbors.”69 According to Calef, Satan did not reside in an invisible world, waiting to attack the invisible one; he lived in the fallen hearts and minds of sinners willing to do evil. Calef ’s criticisms, however, were not initially welcomed in New England. Despite writing More Wonders of the Invisible World seven years after the witch trials in Salem, Calef found it impossible to publish the manuscript. The Mathers maintained a strong influence over New England, so much so that Calef had to get his text published in London. Additionally, several anonymous writers collaborated on a text to refute Calef ’s “scandalous book” in 1701.70 These anonymous authors sought to defend the honor and reputation of the Mathers, as well as assure readers that “the Devils cannot afflict in the Shape of an Innocent person” and, as such, the convictions and executions of the witches in Salem were just.71

66 67 68 69 70 71

Hall-Street, over against St. Mary-Ax, and Joseph Collier, at the Golden Bible, on London Bridge, 1700). Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World. Also see Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 327. For a brief summary of Calef ’s arguments, see Louise A. Breen, “Judgment at Salem: War, Witchcraft, and Empire,” in Converging Worlds: Communities and Cultures in Colonial America, ed. Louise A. Breen (New York: Routledge, 2012): 301–304. Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, 205. Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, v. Anonymous, Some few remarks upon a scandalous book, against the government and ministry of New-England, written, by one Robert Calef (Boston: Printed by T. Green, sold by Nicholas Boone, 1701). Some few remarks upon a scandalous book, 37.

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Witches and Witchcraft Across the Enlightenment Atlantic

Discussions of witchcraft were not isolated to the colonies but were robust in England, Scotland, and Ireland as well. Within the Atlantic print culture, London continued to produce volumes related to the study of witchcraft throughout the early eighteenth century. Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus triumphatus (originally published in 1681) was still in publication and circulation.72 Likewise, Robert Burton’s The Kingdom of Darkness, or the History of Dæmons, Spectres, Witches, Apparitions had received its fourth edition in 1728.73 A few new works, however, did appear on the English scene relating to the hunting of witches, the most notable being the physician and scholar Richard Boulton’s 1715 A Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft.74 According to Boulton, the “surest way” to unmask witches beyond a confession was “by their Mark, which is insensible; and, secondly, by their swimming.”75 Boulton defended the Salem and Renfrew witch trials (1697), “citing the weight of historical evidence provided by previous trial confessions as proof of the continuing diabolical threat to Christendom.”76 It is striking that Hale, while hesitant to reference the Devil’s mark as evidence of witchcraft, believed that Satan could leave such marks on his accomplices and victims. Relying on Tertullian and Richard Bernard’s witchcraft treatise (1627), Hale was aware “It’s the Devils custom to mark his.”77 But Hale reasoned that “such a mark is neither ground of conviction or suspicion” because “the Lord sometimes in anger, and sometimes for tryal of his Servants, sends such marks upon the Bodies of men.”78 Hale articulated that the Devil’s mark could only be used as evidence if accompanied by a confession. While Hale suspected that the whole Salem affair was the work of Satan, Bernard defended the events of the Salem witch trials because of their invoking of the Devil’s mark. This is important

72 For example, see: Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus (London: Printed for A. Bettesworth, and J. Batley, in Pater-Noster-Row; W. Mears, and J. Hooke, near Temple-Bar, in FleetStreet, MDCCXXVI. [1726]). 73 Robert Burton, The kingdom of darkness. (London: Printed for A. Bettesworth, and J. Batley, 1728). 74 See Ray Porter, “Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought,” in The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 5: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), 199–210. 75 Richard Boulton, A compleat history of magick, Sorcery, and witchcraft, vol. 1. (London, 1715), 23. This echoes the same signs from James I’s Dæmonologie in 1597. 76 Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 39. 77 Hale, A modest enquiry into the nature of witchcraft, 71. 78 Hale, A modest enquiry into the nature of witchcraft, 71.

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because it reveals that, though these two men differed in their approach to witch trials, both maintained a firm belief in witchcraft. In the past, scholars have pointed to Suffolk Anglican clergyman Francis Hutchinson’s response to Boulton as evidence of the decline in the belief in witchcraft. Published in 1718, Hutchinson’s A Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft was designed to expose the dangers of witch-hunting and undermine the popular excitement witchcraft panic incited. Hutchinson attacked the witchcraft trials for their acceptance of evidence from small children, people suffering from delusions, and how these trials typically turned into a political circus.79 In no uncertain terms, Hutchinson pronounced, “I think it a Point very certain, That tho’ the sober belief of good and bad Spirits is an essential Part of every good Christian’s Faith, yet imaginary Communications with them, have been the Spring both of the worst Corruptions of Religion, and the greatest Perversions of Justice.”80 While Hutchinson “conclusively demonstrated how parishes created their own witches,” it would be a mistake to think that he did not believe Satan and evil forces were at work within the world.81 Hutchinson argued, “I make no great doubt, but that we have as many Devils now amongst us, as they had in other Ages.”82 Like Hale, Hutchinson blamed the Devil for the witchcraft of old, arguing that “if they that have been thought to have been betwitch’d, have really been Demoniacs, and the Devil by their Mouth that carried on his great Work of false accusing, and murdering innocent people.”83 Hutchinson reckoned with the power and agency of evil spirits and agreed that witches had and did exist. The issue was not whether or not witchcraft existed, but whether or not witchcraft could be tried in a court of law. Hutchinson’s Essay was an attack on the political structures that had empowered violent miscarriages of justice. He did not blame the belief in witches, but rather the ministers and magistrates who had permitted these injustices. Anglican cleric Jacques de Daillon responded to Boulton and defended Hutchinson, providing commentary on the state of the witchcraft debate in the early eighteenth century, insightfully stating “the Dispute concerning Witches

79 For a brief summary of Hutchinson’s arguments, see Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Wigs: The life of Bishop Francis Hutchinson, 1660–1739 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 93–128. 80 Francis Hutchinson, An historical essay concerning witchcraft (London: MDCCXVIII. [1718]), vi. 81 Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft and Neighbourliness in Early Modern England,” in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 228. 82 Hutchinson, An historical essay concerning witchcraft, 50. 83 Hutchinson, An historical essay concerning witchcraft, 52.

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and Apparitions seems not to be at an End.”84 Hutchinson’s treatise would receive a German translation in 1727, featuring a preface from legal expert and witchtrial critic Christian Thomasius.85 But Hutchinson’s criticism received some of its own, being mocked by an anonymous ballad published in 1726 from Dublin: Least witches and spirits our children should fright, He [Hutchinson] on that occasion did learnedly write, And at tea told Grace [his wife] t’was no breach of the law, Tho’ men should spew pins and old women spit straws.86

In the later part of the seventeenth century in Scotland, George Mackenzie voiced his concerns over witchcraft trials as well, but he also did not deny the reality of witches. Although he was skeptical of their supposed magical abilities to take flight and transform into animals, Mackenzie maintained that witches did indeed exist. The problem was proving their complicity within a legal framework, not criticizing their existence. While Scotland did decriminalize witchcraft in 1736, like Mackenzie, most Scottish judges, magistrates, and clergy showed reluctance to challenge the reality of witches and witchcraft.87 Mackenzie’s commentary on the Witchcraft Act of 1563 influenced the first Regius Professor of Law of the University of Glasgow, William Forbes. In 1730, Forbes published Institutes of the Law of Scotland and defined witchcraft as “that black art whereby strange and wonderful things are wrought by the power derived from the devil.” He even commented, “nothing seems plainer to me that there may be and have been witches, and that perhaps such are now actually existing.” It should be no surprise then that witchcraft continued to be invoked (to differing effects) throughout the courts of Scotland in the eighteenth century.88 In Ireland, the words ‘witch’ and ‘witchcraft’ continued to be included in spelling manuals and dictionaries throughout the early eighteenth century.89

84 Jacques de Daillon, Daimonologia: or, a treatise of spirits. Wherein several places of Scripture are expounded by Comte du Lude (London, 1723), 157. 85 See Francisci Hutchinson, Historischer Versuch von der Hexerey, (Leipzig: Johann Christoph Martini, 1726). 86 Anonymous, An Excellent New Ballad (Dublin, 1729), in Mary Pollar, ed., A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade, 1550–1800 (London: Biographical Society, 2000), 274. 87 See Brian P. Levack, Witch-hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics, and Religion (London: Routledge, 2008), 145–161; Brian P. Levack, “The decline and end of Scottish witch-hunting,” in The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, ed. Julian Goodare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002): 166–181. 88 Lizanne Henderson’s offers an exhaustive study of 18th century Scottish witchcraft trials in the second half of her monograph on the history of Scottish witchcraft. See Lizanne Henderson, Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment: Scotland, 1670–1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 150–320. 89 See Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 109.

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Despite what some have assumed, witchcraft continued as a subject of legal debate and theological interest throughout the first half the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the eighteenth century did mark a pivotal change in the understanding of witchcraft, this shift primarily manifested in legal and religious discourse. As Malcolm Gaksill rightly notes, the men who debated the nature of witchcraft “belonged to an age of divine providence and revelation, and differed only in the extent to which they managed and suspended disbelief.”90 Within the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century, the age of witchcraft had changed, but it had not died. It was into this changing age that Jonathan Edwards was born.

6.4

Edwards’ Education on Witchcraft and the Demonic

Given the still-pervasive belief in witchcraft throughout early eighteenth-century New England, there are a few obvious sources from which Edwards would have learnt about witchcraft. The logical answer would be from his family, most likely from his minister father Timothy Edwards (1668–1759). Timothy had studied under Increase Mather at Harvard College, and he came to know and venerate Cotton Mather.91 This respect was reflected in the large number of works written by the Mathers in Timothy’s personal library.92 Family gossip was probably another source of influence, particularly when it came the Edwards’ own encounters with the demonic. Mercy Tuttle Brown (1650–1695), Jonathan’s grandaunt, murdered her seventeen-year-old son and was accused of doing so under the influence of the Devil.93 Another sure influence for Edwards’ understanding of witchcraft would have been from Yale College. Edwards joined Yale College in 1716 at the age of 13 and began his formal study of theology, philosophy, science, and logic. John Locke’s 90 Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft Trials in England,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 284. 91 Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), 263–265. 92 Twenty percent of Timothy Edwards’ personal library were titles by Increase and Cotton Mather. See Kenneth P. Minkema, “Appendix A. Timothy Edwards’ Library and Reading,” in WJE 26:363. 93 See Ava Chamberlain, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 90–91. Edwin Powers describes how all crime was rooted in sin and thus the Devil was the cause of all crime, making “the Devil as a sort of codefendant” in colonial indictments. See Edwin Powers, Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620–1692: A Documentary History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 560.

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influence on Edwards has been long noted (and debated) by scholars.94 Perry Miller goes so far to call Edwards’ encounter with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding “the central and decisive event in his intellectual life.”95 Samuel Hopkins claims that Edwards first encountered Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in his second year of schooling.96 Norman Fiering has argued that it is more likely that Edwards read it as a graduate student or tutor first, after Yale College acquired a copy for its library.97 Regardless of when Edwards first read Locke’s Essay, his study inserted in him into the shifting intellectual landscape concerning witches and witchcraft. Locke himself was extremely interested in (although skeptical about) witchcraft, and regularly inquired with his friends about witch trials, but he never made his views on the subject clear, either in private or public.98 Locke’s philosophy emphasized empirical knowledge and sought to avoid objects and phenomena that did not fall “under the reach of our senses” or were “not capable of testimony”; these included “the existence, nature and operations of finite immaterial beings without us spirits, angels, devils, etc.”99 In other words, Locke did not say that there were no spirits or witches or demons roaming the earth, but he thought it impossible to arrive at any certain knowledge of them. Although Locke’s Essay was a part of a growing shift towards empiricism and skepticism,

94 For a small survey of the scholarship related to John Locke’s influence on Jonathan Edwards, see Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” Harvard Theological Review 41 (1948): 123–145; Edward H. Davidson, “From Locke to Edwards,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 355–372; Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 7.1 (1969): 51–61; Jean-Pierre Martin, “Edwards’s Epistemology and the New Science,” Early American Literature 7.3 (1973): 247–255; Norman Fiering, “The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards’s Metaphysics,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 73–93; Robert E. Brown, “Edwards, Locke, and the Bible,” The Journal of Religion 79.3 (1999): 361–384; Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the EighteenthCentury Divines (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 16–62. 95 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Toronto: William Sloane Associates, 1949), 52. 96 Samuel Hopkins, The life of the late reverend, learned and pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards: some time minister of the gospel at Northampton, in New England. and then missionary to the Indians at Stockbridge, and after that president of New Jersey College. Who departed this life at Princeton, March 22, 1758, in the 55th year of his age (Boston: Printed and sold by S. Kneeland, opposite the Probate-Office, in Queen-Street, MDCCLXV [1765], 3. 97 Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Eugene: Wipf and Stock and the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, 2006), 32–34. 98 Peter Elmer, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 295–297. 99 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Kenneth P. Winkler (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1996), 310.

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“witchcraft was not ruled out by the new epistemology.”100 After all, Boulton’s History of Magick used Locke’s concept of human understanding to support belief in witches.101 With the outbreak of revivals across the colonies between 1735–1745, Edwards warned against displays of “enthusiasm” via visions, revelations, and dreams, though it appears he did not outright reject the possibility of non-scriptural revelation.102 Nor did he reject the possibility of angelic or demonic visitation. Like Hale, Calef, and Hutchinson, Edwards emphasized the power of Satan to influence weak and wicked people, causing them to act on behalf of evil forces. George Marsden notes, “While he often spoke of Satan as a personal agent, he almost never mentioned witches.”103 Despite his regular writings on demons and Satan, and rare reflections on witchcraft, Edwards did, however, encounter works that mentioned witches, such as the works of the Mathers and the Bible itself. Although not being a central part of his work, Edwards did write about witchcraft.

6.5

Edwards and the Mathers’s Legacy

Cotton Mather’s legacy was clearly felt at Yale College; after all, it was he who had secured the gift from the English merchant Elihu Yale, after whom the college was named.104 The trustees even approached Mather in the hopes of replacing the acting college rector, Timothy Cutler, but apparently he was not interested in the position.105 Yet the most direct source of the Mathers’ influence at Yale would have come from the college library. At the time of Edwards’s enrollment, Yale College owned an impressive amount of Cotton and Increase Mather’s works. This included collected sermons, reflections on scripture, and theological meditations.106 Among these works, students would have had access to Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), in which he recounted the events of

100 Ian Bostridge, “Witchcraft Repealed,” in Witchcraft in the British Isles and New England, Vol. 3: New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, ed. Brian P. Levack (New York: Routledge, 2001), 316. 101 Boulton, History of Magick, 167. 102 See Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 103 George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 69. 104 Brooks Mather Kelley Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 24–25. 105 Kelley Yale: A History, 34. 106 James E. Mooney, ed., Eighteenth-Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library (New Haven: Yale University Beinecke Library, 2001), A10; A17; A20; A21; A31; A33; A36.

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the Salem witch trials and other demon possessions, demonstrating Satan’s interest and God’s providence in the English American colonies.107 Notably missing from the Yale College library is Cotton’s Wonders of the Invisible World and Increase’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits. This is the same at Harvard College, which likewise featured an impressive amount of the Mathers’ works but lacked the ones on witchcraft.108 This suggests a strategic attempt to suppress these works from influencing the young men of Yale and Harvard, particularly those preparing for the ministry. Yet the students of Yale and Harvard could have learnt about such works most easily from reading about the Mathers themselves. Along with several of the Mathers’ works, Yale College’s library also held their biographies.109 Cotton Mather published a memoir about the life and work of his father, Increase (who died in 1723), while Edwards was a tutor at Yale College. In this memoir, Cotton described Increase as “a Writer about Witchcraft” and attacked Hutchinson’s Essay concerning Witchcraft as a “weakly and rashly” representation of his father’s work.110 Cotton coolly wrote, “I do not find his [Hutchinson’s] Performance has been any Disadvantage to either Mr. Baxter’s or Mr. Mather’s Reputation.”111 As for Calef ’s More Wonders, Cotton decried it as a text “full of gross, sordid, and notorious Lies.”112 In detailing his father’s catalogue of books, Cotton included Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits.113 Cotton Mather died soon after his father in 1728. Just as Cotton had done for Increase, Cotton’s son, Samuel Mather, wrote a memoir in his father’s honor. In his biography, Samuel detailed Cotton’s involvement in the Salem witchcraft trials, reporting of how “the houses of the poor People began to be filled with the Cries of Persons tormented by Evil Spirits.”114 He commented that “There seem’d to be an execrable Witchcraft in the Foundation of this Wondrous Affliction” and that “Mr. Mather, for his Part, was always afraid of proceeding to convict and condemn any person as a Confederate with afflicting Demons upon so feeble an

107 For a brief summary of Magnalia Christi Americana, see: Silverman, Cotton Mather, 157– 167. 108 W. H. Bond and Hugh Amory, eds., The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, 1723–1790 (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1996), A87–88; A111; A122. 109 See Mooney, ed., Eighteenth-Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library, A21; B18. 110 Cotton Mather, Memoirs of the life of the late Reverend Increase Mather, D.D. who died August 23, 1723. With a Preface by the Reverend Edmund Calamy, D.D. (London, MDCCXXIV. [1724]), 37, 64. 111 Mather, Memoirs of the life of the late Reverend Increase Mather, 64. 112 Mather, Memoirs of the life of the late Reverend Increase Mather, 64. 113 Mather, Memoirs of the life of the late Reverend Increase Mather, 87. 114 Samuel Mather, The life of the very Reverend and learned Cotton Mather, D.D. & F.R.S. late Pastor of the North Church in Boston. Who died, Feb. 13. 1727,8 (Boston, New-England, MDCCXXIX. [1729]), 44.

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Evidence as Spectral Representation.”115 Samuel defended his father’s actions throughout the witch trials, boasting how Wonders of the Invisible World was “reprinted several times in London.”116 But hinting at Calef ’s attack on his father’s work, Samuel simply stated, “the Man [Calef] is dead, his Book died long before him.”117 Wonders of the Invisible World was also included in Samuel’s catalogue of his father’s works under the category of “1692.”118 Additionally, Samuel Mather remained as a trustee of Yale College until May 1724, ensuring the Mathers ongoing influence while Edwards was a student.119 In examining Edwards’s personal library of some 800 books, like his father Timothy, he also collected an impressive amount of works by the Mathers.120 Edwards even recounts the story of Isaac Watts receiving a picture of Benjamin Coleman, in which he declares that it will “hang in the same rank with Dr. Increase and Dr. Cotton Mather, in the front of my study.”121 Edwards did own a copy of Magnalia Christi Americana but like the college libraries, missing are the works directly related to witchcraft. Yet Edwards did own Samuel Mather’s The life of the very reverend and learned Cotton Mather. Given his familiarity with the life and works of Cotton Mather, Edwards would have undoubtedly encountered Wonders of the Invisible World. There is textual evidence to support this, as indicated by Edwards’s sermon on “Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit Are Inferior to Graces of the Spirit.” Edwards contends that “the intercourse that witches have with the invisible world has a tendency [to convince us of the existence of a spiritual world beyond the visible one], but [this hardly makes such practices aids to faith].”122 The phrasing, with its direct citation of “witches” and “invisible world,” suggests a passing knowledge with Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World. Given Edwards’s respect for the Mathers, his acquaintance with their works, his knowledge of their lives, and their legacy at Yale College, it is almost certain that Edwards would have been aware of their involvement in the witch trials of Salem in 1692. Additionally, at the time of Edwards’s education, Yale College’s library did own two significant works related to witchcraft: Hutchinson’s A Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft and Glanvill’s Saducismus triumphatus.123 Harvard College also owned a copy of Hutchinson’s Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft, 115 116 117 118 119 120

Mather, The life of the very Reverend and learned Cotton Mather, 44. Mather, The life of the very Reverend and learned Cotton Mather, 46. Mather, The life of the very Reverend and learned Cotton Mather, 46. Mather, The life of the very Reverend and learned Cotton Mather, 162. Kelley, Yale: A History, 35. One-fifth of the books and pamphlets owned by Edwards were by Cotton and Increase Mather; see WJE 26:362–363. 121 WJE 1: 92. 122 WJE 25:310. 123 Mooney, ed., Eighteenth-Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library, A14.

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although this copy was the second edition from 1720, which included a chapter attacking the Mathers for the events of 1692 in Salem.124 While there is no evidence that Edwards read these texts, the language Edwards employs in his exegesis of 1 Sam. 28:3–25 suggests a familiarity with contemporary vocabulary and texts concerning witchcraft.

6.6

Edwards, Witchcraft, and the Witch of Endor

The passage in question, King Saul’s consultation of the Witch of Endor, offers a rare insight into Edwards’s thought and theology about witches and witchcraft. Glanvill commented that this passage was “as plain as Proof thereof can be desired by any Man [of witches] whose Mind is not blinded with Prejudices.”125 Edwards’s text, however, was not a piece on witchcraft but rather a sermon he delivered in February of 1732 or 1733. Edwards would have been the full pastor of the First Church of Northampton, Massachusetts, for a few years at this point, following the death of Solomon Stoddard in 1729. The theme was on the ruin of the soul, using Saul as his model; though Saul been bestowed great gifts by the Spirit, God had progressively forsaken him because Saul never fully turned to God. One of the sinful actions taken by Saul that Edwards highlighted was his “very wicked act” of seeking out the Witch of Endor.126 Edwards called this a “strange and unreasonable Action,” stating that “it was a very foolish and unreasonable action”127 Edwards called the product that the witch summoned an “Apparition” of Samuel. Edwards’s phrase echoes Glanvill’s language, who likewise called what appeared before Saul an “apparition.”128 Edwards remarked how shocking this change was for Saul, noting: “There was a time when saul was a Religious Person he not only had a Conscientious Respect to his duDuty hims. but seems to have a Zeal against sin in others & that they should do their duty thus he had destroyed the Zealously destroyed the witches & those that had a familiar sp. out of the Land as he was Commanded to do in the 124 See W. H. Bond and Hugh Amory, eds., The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, 1723–1790 (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1996), 285. 125 Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus, 40. 126 WJE 48:272. 127 WJE 48:272. 128 Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus, 56. Hutchinson, on the other hand, ruled that the woman whom Saul consulted was not a witch, but a “diviner.” She was an ancient world con-artist who “took Men’s Minds off their Dependence upon the True God and his Providence, and made them look rather to the Stars, and Daemons, and dead Men and Charms, and Omens.” What Saul saw was trickery, not an apparition, because of the “Dejection of [his] Mind.”

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Law of mos.”129 It is noteworthy that Edwards decided on striking out the phrase “the witches” and omitting it from his sermon. Given that he had praised the work of Saul in destroying those who had “a familiar spirit” (another stable term in the lexicon of witchcraft), perhaps Edwards was nervous of what such inflammatory language would inspire.130 Edwards also commented on this story in his “Blank Bible,” writing: “Saul did by the witches as hypocrites sometimes do by their sins. It is said in the 1 Samuel 28:3, that ‘Saul had put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land.’ But when he is hard drove, he calls for ’em again.”131 In regards to magic, most of Edwards’s writings on the subject are drawn from the biblical references to the accusations of Christ being a magician. In a sermon on Luke 9:18, Edwards chastises the Deists who think Christ was an “Impostor a meer Cheat” but he also decries those who “think that he was a meer man and did all that he by magick and a familiarity with the devil.”132 According to Edwards, this was the charge laid against Christ by the Pharisees, whom he compared to the “the Jews” of his day, claiming “they don’t deny his miracles but Lay em to magick & or witchcraft.”133 Once again, the language of “familiarity with the devil” suggests an acquaintance with witchcraft literature, or at least the philology regarding witches. The phrase itself appears across the witchcraft works of Cotton Mather, reports of witch trials, and historical narratives about witchcraft.134 Another term employed by Edwards is “wizard.” Once again, Edwards places the term in the mouth of Christ’s critics, particularly those of “the Jews.” According to Edwards, “Sometimes [the Jews] charged him with being a wizard, and 129 WJE 48:272. 130 For more on “familiar spirits,” see Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press 2005), 59–61. 131 WJE 24:359. 132 WJE 47:238. 133 WJE 47:238. 134 For examples, see Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 396; John Beaumont, An historical, physiological and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, witchcrafts, and other magical practices (London: Printed for D. Browne, 1705), 131; Francis Bragge, A full and impartial account of the discovery of sorcery and witchcraft, practis’d by Jane Wenham of Walkerne in Hertfordshire, upon the Bodies of Anne Thorn, Anne Street (London: Printed for E. Curll, 1712), 16; The case of the Hertfordshire witchcraft consider’d (London: Printed for John Pemberton, MDCCXII. [1712]), 66; Daniel Defoe, A system of magick; or, a history of the black art (London: Printed and sold by J. Roberts, 1727), 209; Thomas Hutchinson, The history of the province of Massachusets-Bay, from the charter of King William and Queen Mary, in 1691, until the year 1750 (Boston: Printed by Thomas & John Fleet, 1767), 18. Also see Stephen J. Stein, “Jonathan Edwards and the Cultures of Biblical Violence,” in Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth, ed. Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, & Caleb J. D. Maskell (Lanham: University Press of America, 1975), 54–64.

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one that wrought wonders by the help of the devil. They often, when they saw his miracles, were wont to say that he did what he did by the power of Beelzebub. Yea, they called him a devil himself.”135 In citing Christ’s controversial credentials, Edwards notes that Jesus was known as a “blasphemer, and a glutton and a winebibber, a sabbath breaker, a wizard, and a friend of publicans and sinners.”136 Edwards’s writings make it clear that he regarded witchcraft as sin. In The Life of David Brainerd, Edwards comments, “Mankind, of course, had always to confront ills such as death, disease, and witchcraft, but these had not come through his fault; they were the result of chance or mischief conjured up by some primal being.”137 Likewise, in Ecclesiastical Writings he states, “Now when it is supposed, that morally insincere persons are expressly forbidden, the thing meant can’t be, that they are forbidden in those very words; for no such prohibition is to be found: nor are men that live in sodomy, bestiality and witchcraft, anywhere expressly forbidden in this sense.”138 While Edwards never seemed to separate the sin of witchcraft and expound on it in isolation, it appears across his sermons in conjunction with the sins of idolatry, wrath, adultery, envy, etc.139 Thus Edwards did not ignore witchcraft, but nor he did not highlight it either. The Witch of Endor appears to be the only “witch” who caught Edwards’s scholarly attention, although the sin of witchcraft still concerned him because of the Scripture’s warnings (Gal. 5:19–20).

6.7

Jonathan Edwards and the “Delusions of Satan”

While the witch was not a dominant figure throughout colonial New England in the early eighteenth century, she (as women were still the primary targets of witchcraft allegations) was still present in belief, texts, trials, and accusations. Though previous generations had expressed extreme paranoia over the everpresent magical attacks of Satan via witches, but the early eighteenth-century saw the witch’s powers and presence minimalized and marginalized. Belief in the reality of witches remained, but the legal and cultural systems had changed in such a way that made her an exceptional figure, hard to locate and with powers that were next to impossible to prove. This change can be seen in Jonathan Edwards, who, while not a philosopher on witchcraft or a witch hunter in any sense, did believe in witches and witchcraft, as evidenced by his writings. 135 136 137 138 139

WJE 8:197–198. WJE 47:256. WJE 7:25. WJE 12:458. See WJE 14:361, 500; WJE 22:66, 149.

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Most likely, Edwards was introduced to these concepts and ideas via his education and his exposure to the supernatural culture of the eighteenth century. Within New England and the wider print culture of the early eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Edwards was part of a changing understanding of witchcraft. His background, education, writings, and matrix reveal the tensions of the age. Edwards believed in the “wonders of the invisible world” and was cautious of the “delusions of Satan” like those experienced in Salem throughout 1692. Edwards is an important example how wider attitudes and beliefs had changed over the first half of the eighteenth century and demonstrates the ways in which witchcraft remained part of religious and cultural discourse. While resigned to the margins of the Enlightenment, the witch was still present in the mind of Jonathan Edwards.

Society

Obbie Tyler Todd (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary)

The Populist Puritan: Jonathan Edwards and the Rise of American Populism

7.1

Introduction

Jonathan Edwards lived during an age of ideas. From Newtonian physics to Lockean epistemology to the new moral philosophy, the Enlightenment injected new ideas into virtually every arena of medieval thought. No corner of society was sacrosanct, not even the very order of society itself. The Enlightenment was an inescapably social and political phenomenon, posing deep questions about class, power, wealth, and government. In the early eighteenth-century, the trans-Atlantic flow of these ideas was almost always westward. In America, for example, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) was considered “political gospel.”1 By the end of 1722, Benjamin Franklin had begun publishing excerpts of Cato’s Letters (1721), a searing polemic against eighteenth-century English politics and society. The year of Solomon Stoddard’s death also saw the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729), a satirical essay that highlighted callous English attitudes toward the immigrant poor, appealing greatly to the colonists’ Whiggish sensibilities. As Gordon Wood notes, “Cosmopolitanism was one of the great ideals of the Enlightenment.”2 Ideas such as inalienable rights, natural law, and contractual government that would inevitably help forge the new republic were ascendant during Edwards’s lifetime. The result was an incipient eighteenth-century colonial populism that would eventually ignite both political and ecclesiastical upheaval, suffusing the nascent country with what Nathan Hatch has described as a “surge of movements fueled by the passions of ordinary people.”3 This leveling effect, however, did not occur overnight. In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard 1 Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 27. 2 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 221. 3 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 7.

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Bailyn identifies the unique progression of these movements, “The great social shocks that in the French and Russian Revolutions sent the foundations of thousands of individual lives crashing into ruins had taken place in America in the course of the previous century, slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly, not as a sudden avalanche but as myriads of individual changes and adjustments which had gradually transformed the order of society.”4 Many of these “individual changes and adjustments” took place most profoundly through the ministry of Jonathan Edwards, who bent the popular impulses of his time to his Puritanical will. This chapter will identify Edwards as a “populist Puritan” who both fueled and filtered the popular ethos of his age, further vindicating Perry Miller’s assertion that the Northampton sage “was not only a child of America, but, as such, is one of its supreme critics.”5 In The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch identifies three ways that religious populism “articulated a profoundly democratic spirit.”6 These will serve as the criteria by which Edwards is identified as a “populist Puritan” who served as a kind of forerunner to later popular movements: (1) challenging age-old barriers between learned clergy and ordinary people, (2) empowering the laity by legitimizing their deepest spiritual impulses, (3) and reducing limitations on religious outsiders.7 These seminal ideas took embryonic form in the early eighteenth-century, and Edwards adopted each in some measure, but never in an iconoclastic sense. Pouring the novel ideas of the Enlightenment into the old wineskins of Puritanism, Edwards’s genius was well suited for a nation in theological, sociological, and political flux.

7.2

Edwards Against the Elites

Populism always begins with an antagonist. In Congregational New England, Anglicanism and its spiritual elites were the objects of suspicion and even scorn. For this reason, the “apostasy” of Edwards’ former Yale tutor Samuel Johnson and Rector Timothy Cutler to the Church of England was a cause celebre in New

4 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 19. 5 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949), 179. 6 Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 9. 7 Despite the fact that Hatch’s work primarily examines an epoch of American religious history after the American Revolution, it is the contention of this chapter that these nascent forces were at work in the ministry and life of Jonathan Edwards, finding fuller (and often more extreme) expression in the nineteenth-century “surge of movements fueled by the passions of ordinary people,” see Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 9–10.

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England and a source of great pain to the entire Congregationalist community.8 Not only had the Church of England embraced Arminianism in its post-Laudian years, but Anglican bishops and priests were often viewed as political chess pieces for the despotic English crown.9 Any distillation of Edwards’ public theology must begin with this unique eighteenth-century context, particularly in Congregational Massachusetts. Edwards was a true scion of the Congregationalist way and a Puritan stalwart of the local covenant. This, however, did not make him a champion of religious liberty in any modern sense. As Harry Stout explains, “In the Puritan state, religious freedom would be tolerated no further than the boundaries of ‘gospel order’ determined by the Congregational churches.”10 The Constantinian idea of Christendom along with the combination of national and local covenants within the “Puritan canopy” helped forge a church-state synthesis, the likes of which Edwards would challenge in ‘the Lord’s Supper controversy’ without pulling it down completely.11 After all, this particular societal structure supported the very pulpit from which Edwards preached. The New England sermon was “authority incarnate.”12 According to Mark Noll, “Christian believers in colonial America, though overwhelmingly Protestant, still assumed that God had structured society like a pyramid and that contentment with one’s created place was a godly virtue. The respect owed to pastors was an instance of the deference due to all whom God had placed in their superior stations.”13 As a firm believer in social and natural hierarchies, and as the grandson of the ‘Pope’ of the Connecticut River Valley Solomon Stoddard, Edwards adhered to and defended a societal system that extolled pastoral authority.14 In many ways, Jonathan Edwards’s Puritanism was as involuntary as breathing oxygen, and it permeated every aspect of his personal, professional, and political life. His suspicion of republicanism, for instance, was bequeathed to him by his 8 When Rector Timothy Cutler closed his prayer at the 1723 Yale commencement with the phrase “and let all the people say, amen,” quoting the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, George Marsden describes the scene as such: “It was as though, in a later era, at an NAACP rally, the president had unfurled a Confederate flag or the commencement preacher at Bob Jones University had closed with a prayer to the Blessed Virgin.” (George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 83). 9 Samuel Johnson would later become president of King’s College (Columbia) in New York and would thoroughly repudiate the Calvinism of his youth. 10 Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 21. 11 Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31. 12 Stout, The New England Soul, 23. 13 Noll, America’s God, 19. 14 For instance, Edwards regrettably supported the institution of slavery.

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Congregationalist forbears. John Cotton, the man who originally coined the word “congregationalism,” had once said of democracy: “I do not convey that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?”15 Edwards inherited Cotton’s theocratic ideal in his disdain for partisan politics. In a political sermon delivered in 1731, Edwards lamented the “unsettled” political climate and declared that “the very excellency of a public state is its stability.” “Tis no part of public prudence,” Edwards averred, “to be often changing the persons in whose hands is the administration of government.”16 This paternalistic penchant for order also drove Edwards to support the Saybrook Platform that allowed ministers from the Hampshire Association to regulate the admittance of ministerial candidates for churches, eviscerating local church autonomy.17 Nevertheless, despite Edwards’ paternalism, Edwards was both a medieval and a modern.18 As a Calvinist theologian unafraid to co-opt the best ideas from the Age of Reason, Edwards clothed ancient biblical truths in new language and renovated them with new concepts.19 As the lay religion and social upheaval of the Great Awakening gathered steam, Edwards summoned Enlightenment ideas in order to address the divisive issue of the day: the nature of true conversion. His conclusions would not only forge his new ecclesiology; it would pit him against both popular evangelists and high church pastors alike. At the beginning of Religious Affections (1947), Edwards described his complex relationship with the revival: “Tis’ a hard thing to be a hearty zealous friend of what has been good and glorious, in the late extraordinary appearances, and to rejoice much in it; and at the same time, to see the evil and pernicious tendency of what has been bad, and earnestly to oppose that.”20 As a populist Puritan, Edwards refused to completely dismiss a disorderly, popular religious movement simply due to its spiritual aberrations.21

15 Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 97. 16 The State of Public Affairs (between August 1731 and December 1732), WJE, 17:355, 354. On another occasion, Edwards even identified “chief men in the town, of chief authority and wealth” as the source of partisan politics in Northampton, taking stock of the “innumerable contentions” they caused, see WJE, 16:381–83). 17 The local autonomy of Congregationalist churches was altered in 1708 with the Saybrook Platform, a new constitution that mirrored Presbyterian polity by giving the association the authority to regulate which candidates were admitted. Edwards’ grandfather Solomon Stoddard advocated for this centralization of authority, essentially suppressing localism. 18 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 213. 19 This will be discussed extensively in the next section. 20 WJEO 2:85. 21 Once such aberration was the instance of itinerant James Davenport taking off his pants at a book burning!

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His long-awaited defense of the Great Awakening came in the form of Some Thoughts Concerning The Revival of Religion in New England, published in 1742. According to Edwards, “We should distinguish the good from the bad, and not judge of the whole by a part.”22 Insofar as it accorded with “true religion,” Edwards was a “hearty zealous friend” of the Great Awakening, even with its revolutionary ideas about church and state.23 As a Puritan, Edwards was unquestionably a social conservative; as a pastor, he was willing to adapt to the changing relations and changing needs of his generation. In Edwards’ mind, the itinerant ministry of George Whitefield met those changing needs. Although the social structure of the colonies lacked any kind of caste or rigid dependency system like that of industrialized England, an emerging commercial marketplace economy had begun distinguishing between landowning gentry and the lower classes. The fire of revivalism, notably among the Methodists, was stoked most vigorously among the laboring classes, where resistance from the Anglican establishment was least.24 The nascent concept of market aided these groups in transcending traditional social and religious barriers. As Stout puts it, “In economic terms, religion increasingly represented a product that could be marketed. In turn, the public supported its marketers, together with the charitable and religious causes they championed, liberated from past patriarchal relations and freely responsible for making their own choice.”25 Through spiritual ‘entrepreneurs’ like Whitefield, the Great Awakening not only brought the pulpit outdoors; it also divested the church of its institutional authority, and this individualization appealed greatly to the commoner of Edwards’ day. Edwards the populist boasted in “such multitudes of all kinds of capacities, natural tempers, educations, customs, and manners of life” that were “so greatly and variously affected.”26 The social breadth of the revival only further legitimized it as an authentic work of the Spirit of God. But not everyone in New England shared Edwards’ sanguine view of the Awakening. Six months after the publication of Some Thoughts, anti-revivalist and pastor of Boston’s First Church Charles Chauncy harangued Edwards in

22 WJE 4:42. 23 “One of Edwards’s greatest successes was to formulate a rubric for assessing a believer’s experience in the Spirit, articulated in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, and especially Religious Affections, arguably Edwards’s most important theological work.” (Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 204–205). 24 Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7. 25 Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1991), 35–36. 26 Jonathan Edwards, WJE 4:291.

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Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743).27 Rejecting the radical “fanaticism” of itinerants such as James Davenport, Chauncy refuted Edwards point by point and sought to discredit the entire movement in two primary ways. In the preface, Chauncy recounted the story of the colonies’ first lay heretic, Anne Hutchinson.28 By likening the social chaos and “enthusiasm” of the Awakening to the Antinomian controversy, Chauncy unequivocally denounced the entire movement as heretical and as harmful to the very order of society. According to Chauncy, the popular movement “tends to nothing…but to destroy the peace of the churches, and fill the world with contention and confusion.”29 Against this kind of Procrustean dismissal of the Awakening by reluctant rationalists and clerical elites, Edwards wasn’t simply defending the orthodoxy of the revival; he was defending the social and political respectability of lay religion. If Jonathan Edwards was indeed a “conservative revolutionary” as George Marsden has appropriately labeled him, perhaps no issue during the Great Awakening mustered his conservative spirit quite like the anticlericalism endemic to eighteenth-century religious populism. For instance, Presbyterian itinerant Gilbert Tennent’s widely circulated The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740) called upon listeners to leave churches where they considered the pastors to be unredeemed.30 George Whitefield’s “inverted jeremiads,” while not necessarily anti-hierarchical, lamented the spiritual decline of dissolute ministers.31 The individualism of the Enlightenment was never more potent in American religion than when it brazenly challenged the established authority of the pulpit, and this troubled Edwards. The itinerants brought with them an anti-authoritarian climate that soon spread to the universities. George Whitefield, for example, publicly recorded the impiety of Harvard students and faculty in his Journal, inciting outrage from the latitudinarian school. Even a precocious young student at Yale by the name of David Brainerd was so influenced by the preaching of itinerant James Davenport that he openly questioned the salvation of tutors and professors. He was subsequently expelled.32 Battle lines were often generational and socioeconomic, and 27 Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (Boston, 1743). 28 Chauncy was the pastor at Boston’s First Church, the site of Hutchinson’s rebellion. In many ways, Chauncy saw himself as the self-appointed defender of rational religion. 29 Charles Chauncy, Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against (Boston, 1742), p. v. 30 By 1742, Tennent broke ministry ties with James Davenport, unable to tolerate Davenport’s encouragement of independent revivalist congregations and his emphasis upon direct revelation from the Spirit. 31 Whitefield would later apologize for the spirit and wording of his message to Harvard. 32 During this time, an anti-authoritarian spirit wasn’t simply relegated to religion. In 1743, Samuel Adams received his degree of Master of Arts from Harvard College. His thesis was

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the rift at the university level was symptomatic of something much larger. Michael J. Crawford explains, “While the Revival’s origins seem to have lain in the middling sort in both Great Britain and New England, it drew a following as well from those who were strangers to economic, social, and political power. The latter were attracted by the movement’s critique of those in authority and its condemnation or contemporary morality and materialism.”33 In other words, as New England’s social landscape found greater extremes, the populist incentive for revival grew. While Edwards embraced the reformulation of social hierarchy between learned clergy and laity, he was by no means an egalitarian. The antiauthoritarian ethos that accompanied the Great Awakening contained a potentially destructive power that Edwards believed should be held in check. As Perry Miller explains: The ancient order of New England had no way to cope with itinerants; it was constructed on the expectation that the church should coincide with the political unit, with the town or the precinct, and that no visitor had a right to invade the bailiwick of a settled pastor without an invitation, as Whitefield and Tennent had been invited. Churches were split, and ultrarevivalists hurled accusations of formality, legalism, and Arminianism, until “censoriousness” became the new, and more terrible, iniquity of infuriated towns.34

After one of Whitefield’s four visits to Northampton, Edwards accompanied the young evangelist to his father’s church in East Windsor, Connecticut. There he finally admonished Whitefield for “judging other persons to be unconverted.” Edwards then recalled, “Mr. Whitefield liked me not so well, for my opposing these things.” Their friendship was never the same afterward.35 United in revivalism, the two were divided concerning the nature and aim of religious populism. Despite his unwavering support for the unconventional, godly preaching of the Awakening, Edwards would never countenance anticlericalism and potential social anarchy. Aligning himself with New Light theology, Edwards was willing to stand with the spiritual vanguard against the ecclesiastical elites, but not at the expense of traditional Puritanical order. Enlightenment individualism had its social and political limits. He was a populist Puritan, confirming Mark Noll’s thesis that if Edwards “was the colonial American who most deeply en-

entitled, “Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.” Adams suggested that the colonies were “subordinate” but not “subject” to the British parliament, citing the British Constitution’s acknowledgement of “essential natural rights.” 33 Crawford, Seasons of Grace, 10. 34 Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 172. 35 Jonathan Edwards, Copies of the Two Letters Cited by the Rev. Mr. Clap, Rector of the College at New Haven (Boston, 1745), 7.

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gaged the new era’s thought, he was also the colonial American who most thoroughly repudiated it.”36

7.3

Edwards and the Commoner

James C. Livingston describes the Enlightenment as “a revolt against authoritarianism and the emergence of individual reason and conscience as the primary arbiters of truth and action.”37 Edwards’ religious populism was a re-interpretation of these two modern axioms through the lens of Puritanism. His wasn’t a revolt against authority; it was recalibration of authority. His individualism was by no means autonomous, but Edwards certainly defended human freedom.38 For this reason, Yale historian Sydney Ahlstrom was almost certainly correct when he speculated that Jonathan Edwards was “possibly the Church’s greatest apostle to the Enlightenment.”39 Wrapping the essence of Calvinism in the accidents of modernity, Edwards empowered the laity of the early eighteenthcentury by giving significance and language to their deepest spiritual impulses.40 Borrowing vocabulary from a rich well of Puritan spirituality, Edwards pioneered a new faculty psychology that legitimized individual religion by recognizing the personal affections as the “springs of all motion.” “Take away all love and hatred,” Edwards declared, “all hope and fear, all anger, zeal, and affectionate desire, and the world would be in such a great measure motionless and dead.”41 With retooled words like “affections” and “sense,” Edwards bequeathed an entire nomenclature and conversion psychology to the next generation of revivalistic evangelicals.42 36 Noll, America’s God, 23. 37 James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, 2nd Ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 6. 38 In The Freedom of the Will (1754), Edwards states, “The plain and obvious meaning of the words freedom and liberty, in common speech, is power, opportunity, or advantage, that any one has to do as he pleases. Or in other words, his being free from hindrance or impediment in the way of doing,” see WJEO 1:13. 39 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “Theology In America: A Historical Survey,” in The Shaping of American Religion, ed. James Ward Smith, A. Leland Jamison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 245. 40 This is consonant with Nathan Hatch’s second way by which “the popular religious movements of the early republic articulated a profoundly democratic spirit.” (Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 9). 41 WJEO 2:101. 42 “It is no accident that the theologians of New England were actively involved in the Second Great Awakening, as Edwards was a leader in the first.” (Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney, “Introduction,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of New England Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.

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Edwards’ psychology of conversion, and thus his populism, was built upon the sincere belief that the Gospel was available to all, and that all were capable of receiving the message of Christ. In his Divine and Supernatural Light (1734), Edwards insists, “persons with but an ordinary degree of knowledge, are capable, without a long and subtle train of reasoning, to see the divine excellency of the things of religion.”43 Pulling from centuries of Puritan lay piety, Edwards fashioned modern individualism into a dignified Christian anthropology. In Miller’s view, Edwards “remodeled the Lockean man into a being radically passionate in religion, and then made him available to the democracy.”44 In an age of “inalienable rights,” Edwards had much to say about, and ascribe to, the human person. As a result, the Edwardsean concept of natural ability and the consequent doctrine of immediate repentance are the two primary foci in the “Edwardsean ellipse” which Edwards bequeathed to his successors in the New Divinity.45 Perhaps the most personal aspect of Edwards’ populism was his concept of the second birth, a particular fondness of which he shared with George Whitefield. Religious populism sprang from an emphasis upon personal religious experience, and the notion of the rebirth epitomized this existential moment. The idea of being born again, though no less common among seventeenth-century Puritan preachers, was never as individualistic as it was in the homiletics of George Whitefield, the “Divine Dramatist.”46 His first published sermon, issued in 1737, was based on 2 Corinthians 5:17 and entitled The Nature and Necessity of Our Regeneration or New Birth in Christ Jesus. It was to become his most popular sermon during the Great Awakening and the sum and substance of his revival message. It also resonated with Edwards. As a metaphysical theologian and pastor, Edwards was able to reconcile a high view of natural reason with the traditional Calvinist doctrine of total depravity by developing a nuanced pneumatology. “The Holy Spirit operates in the mind of the godly,” Edwards explained, “by uniting himself to them, and living in them, and exerting his own nature in the exercise of their faculties.”47 In other words, while humanity cannot reach God by strictly natural means, regenerating grace (which is “above nature”) is wrought in the soul by renewing natural human operations. “Not only are remaining principles assisted to do their work more freely and fully, but those principles are restored that were utterly destroyed by the fall.”48 Even in his 43 WJEO 17:423. 44 Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 66. 45 Douglas A. Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 33. 46 Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, title page. 47 WJEO 17:411. 48 WJEO 13:513.

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treatment of humanity’s noetic and volitional limitations, Edwards still ascribed remarkable dignity and value to the most ordinary of sinners. His Puritan populism was constructed upon this kind of high anthropology. Edwards’ extended discourse on the doctrine of the rebirth was his answer to the controversial question of the nature of true conversion. Clerical elites like Charles Chauncy were convinced that the hysteria surrounding the revivals was sufficient cause to conclude that a spirit of “error” had enveloped New England. Religious Affections, on the other hand, was Edwards’ attempt to define “true religion” and to clarify the manifold “holy affections” that are consistent with it.49 The result was not only a view of sanctification that acknowledged the union between body and soul; it also generated a corresponding doctrine of the church. “None ought to be admitted as members of the visible church of Christ but visible and professing saints,” Edwards declared. This seemingly Baptist-like ecclesiology was nothing short of revolutionary in a society built upon a robust covenant theology.50 The social cohesion of each Congregational town was predicated on the tacit assumption of church-state synthesis and the individual commitment of the local covenant. Churches were forged from these covenants, and to disrupt this sequence was indeed revolutionary. In the century prior to Edwards’ Northampton pastorate, the idea of a local covenant had slowly transformed church membership into a kind of hereditary birthright. In 1662, Congregationalists developed the “Half-Way Covenant,” a measure extending infant baptism to the children of parents who were baptized but not professing. By admitting only those who exhibited a credible profession of faith, Edwards vehemently rejected this aspect of the “Congregational way,” effectively repudiating the tradition of his Puritan patriarchs in favor of a single covenant centered on the believer’s personal relationship with Christ. The entire episode, eventually culminating in Edwards’ dismissal in 1750, illustrates both halves of his populist Puritanism. In the shadow of his grandfather, Edwards’ radical ecclesiology was rightfully interpreted as an indictment of “Stoddardeanism.” Claiming the Lord’s Supper to be a “converting ordinance” offered to all, in 1700 Solomon Stoddard penned The Doctrine of Instituted Churches Explained, wherein he affirmed the notion of national churches and denied the necessity of church covenants. Stoddard even famously abandoned 49 John E. Smith once stated that the sum of Jonathan Edwards’ thought could be considered “one magnificent answer” to the question “What is true religion?” see “Editor’s Introduction,” WJE 2:2. 50 “Like the followers of Jonathan Edwards a century and more later, [Roger] Williams thought it compounded the wickedness of wicked men when they went through the motions of religion,” in Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006), 32.

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excommunication as a disciplinary measure in Northampton. While such beliefs and policies increased Stoddard’s reputation for evangelism during the five ‘harvests’ witnessed during his lifetime, they also secured his status as the ‘Pope’ of the Connecticut River Valley, aggrandizing him in a Western Massachusetts kingdom where church and state reached their climax in the Northampton pulpit. As Miller highlights, “Historians have incautiously saluted this innovation as ‘democratic.’ It was exactly the contrary. Bringing all the people officially as well as nominally under his ecclesiastical rule, Stoddard was New England’s greatest autocrat.”51 As the heir apparent to Stoddard’s small ecclesiastical empire, Edwards well understood the consequent pastoral power (and wealth) in a church without discipline. However, his novel view of the Lord’s Supper recognized that pastoral authority is essentially a two-way street. Just as parishioners have an obligation to honor the pastor, the pastor himself has a responsibility to shepherd his flock, not simply to grow it. In this, the people themselves have a measure of power. In his Farewell Sermon, Edwards observed, “It is of vast consequence how ministers discharge their office, and conduct themselves towards their people in the work of the ministry, and in affairs appertaining to it. Tis also a matter of vast importance how a people receive and entertain a faithful minister of Christ, and what improvement they make of his ministry.”52 Charged with the spiritual welfare of his members, Edwards developed an affectionate ecclesiology that essentially diminished his own pastoral sovereignty in order to honor the Greater Shepherd whose souls he was charged with tending.53 Edwards the populist Puritan sacrificed Stoddardean dominion on the altar of born again religion.54 Inevitably, a potent mixture of family feuds and popular sovereignty eventually overtook Edwards from his pulpit at Northampton. According to Mark Noll, “The creation of American theology required first the displacement of European theology. The transition that mattered most for the future United States took place in New England, and the event that most clearly symbolized that transition was the dismissal of Jonathan Edwards from his Northampton, 51 Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 11. 52 WJEO 25:473. 53 “For Edwards…the great advance of learning during the age of Enlightenment, including the natural sciences, was part of a grand teleological enterprise,” see Avihu Zakai, “The Medieval and Scholastic Dimensions of Edwards’ Philosophy of Nature,” in Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee, ed. Don Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), 19. 54 In some sense, Edwards was simply heeding the advice of Stoddard himself in the latter’s Concerning Ancestors when he remarked, “Surely it is commendable for us to examine the practices of our fathers…Let them have as high a character as belongs to them, yet we may not look upon their principles as oracles,” quoted from The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 223.

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Massachusetts, pulpit in 1750.”55 His own church was unwilling and unable to sustain the very tension between Puritanism and populism that Edwards worked so painstakingly to harmonize. By emphasizing lay piety and responsibility in an individualizing age, and by departing from the traditional Puritan societal structure of his forbears, in the end it was Edwards who ironically fell victim to unbridled lay religion. The very authority Edwards handed Northampton was in many ways wielded against him. As in the Enlightenment itself, popular authority transmogrified into popular sovereignty. Edwards followed supernatural Puritanical religion to its natural ecclesiological conclusions and was undone by the very popular movement he helped to create. The Lord’s Supper controversy illustrates perfectly Norman Fiering’s conclusion that “Edwards’ mature political theology resembled a constitutional monarchy rather than an absolute government. The laws were severe, but fixed and intelligible, and not arbitrary.”56 In Northampton, Jonathan Edwards greatly preferred a pastorate to a papacy, a Puritan to a politician.

7.4

The Ecumenical Edwards

Nathan Hatch’s third and final way by which religious populism in the early nineteenth-century “articulated a profoundly democratic spirit” is the reducing of limitations on religious outsiders.57 Here too Edwards was a trailblazer of sorts, paving the way for his revivalist successors. The Great Awakening was a remarkably inclusive and liberating movement that forged a new evangelical harmony, and Jonathan Edwards was a popularizing pioneer in many respects. For instance, Alan Heimert identifies Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1742) as “in a profound sense the first national party platform in American history.” According to Heimert, “Edwards’ thoughts seem totally divorced from all the topics of which partisan issues are presumably made. His thinking reveals the disengagement of the evangelical ministry and populace from the usual institutions and processes of government and politics.”58 In the treatise, Edwards exhorted preachers away from demagoguery and the mere appeasing of sinners. Instead he called them to “be sons of thunder,” unsheathing the sword of the Spirit for the betterment of their hearers.59 By its 55 Noll, America’s God, 31. 56 Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 69. 57 Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 9. 58 Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 13. 59 WJE 1:401.

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evangelical tone and its tone-deafness to traditional political themes, Edwards’ Thoughts served to further propel the revival impulse “toward intercolonial union.”60 Unity was a beloved theme for the Northampton sage, both theologically and anthropologically.61 From the very beginning of his ministerial career, Edwards exhibited a lessthan-subtle ecumenical bent. As the only son of a Congregationalist pastor, the fact that his first pulpit (though short-lived) was a Presbyterian church in New York City is somewhat remarkable. In addition, the Enlightenment served to expose Edwards to a broader array of secular and religious thinking which no doubt eliminated certain prejudices that would have otherwise prevented him from engaging with other religious schools. Even in frontier America, young Edwards was au courant with a prodigious amount of theology and philosophy circulating across the Atlantic.62 This ecumenical impulse was so strong that Mark Valeri has even identified Edwards as the progenitor of a “Cosmopolitan Calvinism” that subsequently flourished among his followers in the New Divinity.63 The international flavor of Edwards’s theology also extended to his doctrine of the church. In 1747, Edwards published A Humble Attempt to Promote…Union Among God’s People in order to precipitate “the last and great enlargement and most glorious advancement of the church of God on earth.” This was to be accomplished by means of a “concert of prayer” in which churches in both the British Isles and the colonies would meet monthly to pray for the “abundant effusion of his Holy Spirit on all the churches.”64 Distinguishing Edwards from other sectarian theologians, Rhys Bezzant has rightly labeled the Northampton pastor an “Ecclesial Internationalist,” a churchman with worldwide aspirations that transcended party lines and denominations.65 Amazingly, Edwards never published a fast or thanksgiving sermon, both of which were standard homiletical tools that Puritan pastors utilized to renew the “peculiar” mission of the American people. Edwards’s brand of Puritanism sacrificed a bit of “American” 60 Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 14. 61 For an incisive study on Edwards’s Trinitarian doctrine of union, see Robert Caldwell, Communion in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2006). 62 Rejecting the Miller thesis, Norman Fiering contends, “It is clear that Edwards was an independent and highly creative thinker; it is also indisputable that at an early age, directly or indirectly, he learned much from his older contemporaries overseas.” (Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context, 21). 63 Mark Valeri, “Jonathan Edwards, the New Divinity, and Cosmopolitan Calvinism,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17. 64 WJE 5:313. 65 Rhys S. Bezzant, Jonathan Edwards and the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 148.

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flavor for the sake of an inclusive missiology. His postmillennial optimism precluded no class, country, ethnicity or Protestant denomination from God’s providential plan of salvation. Avihu Zakai explains: In contrast to New England Puritan historians who construed the Puritan migration to America during the seventeenth century as a great eschatological and apocalyptic event, establishing an essential gulf between the Old and New Worlds, Edwards abandoned the vision of the glorious New World in providential history. The redemptive process concerned all Protestants, regardless of their location.66

Edwards was a pastor-theologian with a global vision for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. His populist Puritanism, however, was almost certainly wider than it was deep. For instance, Edwards celebrated lay religion yet despised lay preaching. He joyously fulfilled his wilderness mission to the Stockbridge Indians yet insisted on a generous income for his Northampton pastorate. He admitted nine Africans into full communicant membership during his ministry at Northampton yet supported the institution of slavery and owned slaves. While Edwards certainly worked to include the socially marginalized in the redemptive plan of God, he was not without his own biases and even his own prejudices. How did Edwards countenance such inconsistencies in his thinking? In reality, historians are no more equipped to answer such a question than to determine how a frontier pastor in Western Massachusetts managed to influence the shape and character of the American church more than any single figure in the eighteenth-century. But as Sydney Ahlstrom rightly notes, “Historically we may never be able to remove every contradiction, resolve every paradox, or fill all the interstices in Edwards’s system. Only his own devout and active intelligence could do that.”67 Indeed, Jonathan Edwards was both elite and ecumenical, Puritan and populist. Despite his reluctance for “inverted jeremiads,” Edwards nevertheless supported the particularly ecumenical ministry of Anglican George Whitefield. According to Stout, this was part of Whitefield’s Herculean power over the American colonies: “He claimed no particular American legacy as his own nor promoted any denomination over another. All Americans could claim Whitefield without sacrificing their particularity.”68 Edwards the populist Puritan was willing to tap into this inclusive spirit without completely forsaking New England patriarchalism. This served as yet another credential to Edwards’s genius: an ability to co-opt the best ideas and talents of others and to subsume them into a larger system of thinking, even when seemingly at philosophical odds or strangely unalike in style. 66 Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 162. 67 Ahlstrom, “Theology In America: A Historical Survey,” 251. 68 Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 252.

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The Populist Puritan

In some measure, although never completely, Edwards the Populist embodied each of Nathan Hatch’s descriptors for nineteenth-century democratic religion. Aligning himself with the likes of homespun itinerants and defending the authenticity of the controversial revivals, Edwards challenged many of the ecclesiastical barriers that previously existed between college-educated clergy and rural laity. He also empowered the laity by insisting upon sinners’ natural ability and by giving voice to such Lilliputian figures of society as young Abigail Hutchinson and five–year-old Phebe Bartlett.69 Lastly, due to his commitment to the unity and scope of the revivals, Edwards overlooked many of the denominational restrictions that often inhibited partnerships with religious outsiders. On the other hand, Edwards the Puritan never followed any of Hatch’s three axioms to their natural, democratic conclusions. His strenuous support for the Awakening, while boasting in lay religion, could never sacrifice venerated pastoral authority. Edwards’s affectionate piety provided a grammar and even a culture for lay spirituality, however, it would not tolerate sheer emotionalism or individualism for its own sake. Thirdly, while Edwards savored his friendships with Presbyterians and Anglicans, his Reformed Protestant worldview was not so ecumenical as to extend fellowship to Catholics or Quakers or other fringe groups. Edwards’s populist Puritanism was simultaneously populistic and Puritanical, and, oddly enough, neither. Despite the number of influences upon Edwards’s thinking, every commitment and tendency in his thought was subordinated to one supreme authority: Holy Scripture. As a result, Edwards the Biblicist “was not only a child of America, but, as such, is one of its supreme critics.”70 In an age of ideas, Edwards the Populist Puritan still beckons his readers not to be defined solely by their social or political milieu, but by divine revelation. Standing at the intellectual crossroads of human history, Jonathan Edwards was a man of seeming contradictions.71 While the epithet “populist Puritan” may appear grossly oxymoronic, Edwards’s unlikely combination of populism and conservative piety has actually endured centuries of American religion, from late nineteenth-century revivalism to the fundamentalist movement of the twen69 Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative can be found in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 4: The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 70 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949), 179. 71 For instance, Edwards could be both austere (i. e. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God) and sincere (i. e. his personal letters to Sarah). He could be both stern (i. e. “The Bad Book Case”) and affectionate (i. e. The Religious Affections). It goes without question that Edwards was more Puritan than populist, hence the alliterative sequence of “populist” and “Puritan” is not reversible.

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tieth.72 Edwards was indeed a forerunner and framer of American evangelicalism. The incipient colonial populism of Edwards’s age was a phenomenon he did not accept in its most primitive, visceral form. As a New Light theologian, however, he was willing to receive and even foment the Awakening’s social instability insofar as the grassroots movement was congruent with the best ideals of Puritanism. His “populist Puritanism” is further evidence to the fact that Edwards “reshaped and refashioned a seventeenth-century Puritan worldview into something that was entirely different; something that, by enlightened eighteenth-century standards, was ‘modern’ and uniquely his own.”73 Just a century later in the Second Great Awakening, the religious populism of the new American nation took on many of the characteristics of its revivalist forbear Jonathan Edwards.

72 “With some historical perspective, however, the combination of evangelical faith, mass media, and a finely-tuned popular style is not surprising at all. Fundamentalists were the heirs of a two-centuries-old revival tradition that had always relied on mass communications to generate public interest and translate the gospel into a popular idiom,” see Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 125. 73 John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, “Editor’s Intro,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 7.

Christian Cuthbert (Alliance Theological Seminary)

“More Swiftly Propagating the Gospel” Jonathan Edwards, Col. John Stoddard, and the Invasion of Canada

8.1

New England’s Martial Context

It is no coincidence that the Age of Enlightenment witnessed a succession of conflicts from the Thirty Year’s War (1618–48) through the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). Europe’s attempt to bring light into the world presupposed darkness in need of enlightenment; often this light spread by the sword. This was as true in Edwards’s Connecticut River Valley as it was on the green fields of France. As the Enlightenment stretched across the Atlantic, it found an unlikely home in the frontier town of Northampton, Massachusetts.1 The prevalence of the thought of Nicholas Malebranche, John Locke, and George Berkeley in the colonies provided Edwards a new discourse for exploring this intellectual heritage.2 Drawing upon this discourse, Edwards re-articulated traditional Reformed doctrines affirming a belief in original sin, providence, and the purposes of the church. The sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light (preached August 1733, published 1734) is representative of the imagery of light central to Edwards’s Enlightenment discourse. Yet Edwards also wrestled with the consequences of this intellectual movement; Enlightenment thought seemed to provide a gravitational force pulling at these traditional Reformed doctrines, tugging them from their moorings.3 Writers such as Thomas Chubb, Daniel Whitney, and Charles Chauncey drew upon this same 1 Scholars such as Avihu Zakai, Josh Moody, and Leon Chai have provided helpful texts describing Edwards’s complex relationship with this intellectual movement. 2 Perry Miller, in his famous biography of Edwards argues for a Lockean context for Edwards’s works whereas Norman Fiering argues for a more Malbranchean context. Edwards’s Catalogue of Books demonstrates a direct knowledge of Bishop Berkeley’s writings (WJE 26:76) and Edwards’s historical and conceptual connection has been argued effectively in Scott Fennema “George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards on Idealism: Considering an Old Question in Light of New Evidence,” Intellectual History Review 29.2, 265–290. 3 WJE 17:408–427.

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discourse in order to subvert the doctrines Edwards held dear.4 What both narratives hold in common is their understanding of the goal of Enlightenment; as the name suggests, it is the process of bringing light into darkness, begging questions of Edwards’s understanding of light and darkness. For many in this period, the light of reason was brought to bear on the darkness of tradition, superstition, and ignorance. Edwards drew on this imagery and discourse to explain his theological commitments. Darkness cast its shadow over Edwards’s New England in three different forms. Heathenism—whether in the form of Native superstition or the sinfulness in the hearts of Edwards’s own congregants—was one enemy of the church. Edwards’s sought to bring light to this darkness through his revival efforts both in Northampton and among the Housatonic in Stockbridge. Second, the shadow of heterodoxy threatened the integrity of Edwards’s Reformed tradition in New England. Liberal pastors such as Springfield’s Robert Breck or Boston’s Charles Chauncy introduced the specter—or at least the rumor—of Arminian thought along the frontier. Edwards’s commitment to the Hampshire County Ministerial Association was the first line of defense against this intellectual drift. Finally, Edwards struggled with the shadow of heresy. For New England, Catholicism cast this shadow sweeping down from French Canada; the presence of Jesuit missionaries along the eastern frontier intensified this religious competition. This spiritual threat led to several inter-colonial military conflicts in King William’s War (1689–97), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), and a complex series of conflicts in the mid-1720’s.5 By the time Edwards took up residence in Northampton in 1726, the memories of generations of conflict along the Connecticut River Valley weighed on the hearts of Northampton. From the abandonment of Deerfield, Northfield, and Suffield during King’ Philip’s War through the destruction and captivity of Deerfield during Queen Anne’s War to the more recent attacks during Greylock’s War, Northampton was well acquainted with the stresses and anxieties warfare brought. Since this shadow fell in the form of military conflict, the shepherd of Northampton’s flock found it difficult to defend his sheep from behind his pulpit. Instead, Edwards promoted a collaboration with public officials to bring light into the papist darkness beyond the St. Lawrence River. 4 For a discussion of some of Edwards’s intellectual interlocutors, see “Edwards and His Antagonists” in the introduction to WJE 1:66–82. 5 Variously referred to as “Father Rale’s War” to describe the conflicts in Maine, “Greylock’s War” to describe the conflicts in the Connecticut River Valley, and “Lovewell’s War” in reference to the scalp bounty activities of Captain John Lovewell, these conflicts lack a careful and coherent historiography. While named according to the separate theaters of conflict, each share in the British rivalry with the French and their allied Native partners. Many have discussed these conflicts under the heading “Dummer’s War” after the Lieutenant Governor who presided over them.

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Edwards’s family long sought such collaboration. His grandfather, Solomon Stoddard—patriarch of Northampton’s pulpit—regularly wrote to the Massachusetts Assembly proposing military solutions to local threats;6 In addition, Jonathan’s father—Timothy Edwards—served as a chaplain in Queen Anne’s War. However, no family member participated in military service more than his uncle, John Stoddard. Solomon’s son John served as a young officer in Queen Anne’s War, narrowly escaping the combined French and Native force at Deerfield in 1704. He quickly moved up the ranks of the militia becoming Col. Partridge’s executive officer by the end of the conflict. John Stoddard continued to serve Northampton as the moderator of town meetings, selectman, and representative to the Massachusetts Assembly; he served the Province as the Justice of the Peace, Justice of the Inferior Court of Pleas, member of the Governor’s Council, and commissioner of Indian Affairs. After the passing of Col. Partridge, Stoddard assumed the duties of colonel of the western militia making him the preeminent public servant in Northampton and the Connecticut River Valley.7

8.2

The Pulpit and Public Service

Various biographers of Edwards depict Col. Stoddard as benefactor and mentor —the political muscle behind Edwards’s innovations.8 However, these biographers fail to capture the close collaboration between the two and Edwards’s profound influence on his uncle. With the nascent revivals of 1735, Col. Stoddard witnessed God’s “surprising work” from the third row of the Northampton meetinghouse. More than a mere witness to the awakenings, the Colonel penned his own defense of the revivals in the 1740’s demonstrating a participation in his 6 Reverend Stoddard frequently intervened in civil affairs, writing on behalf of the town to the General Assembly. When it was proposed to abandon Northampton, Solomon Stoddard successfully appealed to the Assembly, see Slvester Judd, History of Hadley. Springfield: Hunting and Co., 1905, 159. In his History of Northampton, James Trumbull records several instances where Solomon Stoddard intervened to protect his congregation. Another example of his intervention can be found in the letter from Solomon Stoddard to Gov. Dudley 22 October 1703, (Massachusetts Historical Society Collection series 4, II 236–7) where the reverend proposed the use of dogs in warfare. 7 For a thorough treatment of the life of Col. John Stoddard see Christian Cuthbert “Your Most Humble Servant: The Public Service of Col. John Stoddard as an Expression of the Religious Ideology of Jonathan Edwards” (PhD Diss, Union Presbyterian Seminary, 2017). 8 “Edwards’ first instinct, in other words, was to find a pious magistrate-aristocrat to play the role of patron to the pastor as John Stoddard had so long done in Northampton,” quoted from George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 395. Also see Patricia Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 152; Philip Gura, Jonathan Edwards, America’s Evangelical (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 150.

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nephew’s brand of evangelical piety.9 Col. Stoddard participated in Edwards’s campaign against heathenism by supporting the development of the mission to the Housatonic Indians; as Justice of the Peace, Stoddard supported Edwards’s opposition to heterodoxy by intervening in the ordination of Robert Breck, arresting the embattled pastor forcing a hearing of his beliefs. During King George’s War (1744–48), Col. Stoddard used his military position to push for an invasion of Canada—the expulsion of the French Catholic “darkness.” Long after he lost Boston’s support, Col. Stoddard demonstrated a peculiar commitment to the invasion reflected in his correspondence with John Lydius. This commitment cannot be explained by political expediency or military logic; however, this commitment is best understood within the context of Edwards’s apocalyptic vision of history. History, according to Edwards, was moving towards a millennial hope where Christ’s kingdom will reign on earth. In his sermon series entitled A History of the Work of Redemption (preached 1739, published 1774), Edwards outlines a progressive cycle towards this kingdom punctuated by periods of revival and decline.10 In 1743, Edwards wondered whether the new wave of revivals might have been a foretaste of the coming millennium: “’Tis not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit, that is so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least a prelude, of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture.”11 Many New England clergy directed criticism at this level of optimism driving Edwards to clarify his remarks—there need be many more cycles of revival before the millennium could be inaugurated. Yet Edwards never waivered in his conviction that God was driving history towards a millennial kingdom where Christ’s enemies would be made his footstool and reign over the earth. The realization of this grand apocalyptic vision required a collaboration between both minister and magistrate. This collaboration echoed throughout Edwards’s early sermons. Between spring 1730 and fall 1731, Edwards devoted fourteen preaching units to issues with social significance, along with a smattering of additional sermons echoing

9 Unfortunately, this treatise has been lost to history, but it mentioned in Patricia Tracy’s Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth Century Northampton, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 151. 10 In History of the Work of Redemption, Edwards uses various tropes to discuss this advance and retreat including that of light and darkness: “But these words of God in the Genesis 3:15 were the first dawning of the light of the gospel after this darkness. Now first appeared some glimmering of light after this dismal darkness6 which before this was without any glimpse of light, any beam of comfort, or any the least hope.” WJE 9:133. 11 WJE 4:353.

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the same themes before the outbreak of awakening in 1735.12 Edwards delivered the sermon Danger of Decline on election day, May 27th, 1730 which highlighted the impact of political factionalism on the spiritual condition of the community.13 When people were focused on political concerns, there was a corresponding decrease in religious talk and duties and a rise in immorality. This same theme appeared in the sermon Envious Men delivered August 9th, 1730. In this sermon, Edwards connected inner experience and outward duties with societal structures joining the responsibilities of minister and magistrate.14 In late 1731, the sermon The State of Public Affairs decried the effects of instability in the governorship. There was, according to Edwards, a connection between the stability of public servants and the blessings of God’s people in New England.15 These sermons are representative of Edwards’s intellectual framework connecting the duties of the pulpit with those of the public servant. Edwards explicitly outlined this collaboration in the sermon series A History of the Work of Redemption. As the revivals of 1735 waned, Edwards began to understand revivals, not as sustained crescendos, but as cyclical advances and retreats of the Gospel. In 1739, Edwards preached this series of sermons that portrayed all of human and divine history according to this cyclical pattern. Edwards divided history redemptively into three periods: the fall (the need for redemption) through the coming of Christ, the life of Christ (accomplishing redemption), and from Christ’s ascension through the judgment (the application of redemption). Within this framework, Edwards provided meaning and significance for secular events such as the rise and fall of empires. McDermott and McClymond have identified two strategies by which Edwards provided meaning for these secular events. The first strategy involves understanding evil and corrupt social and political forces as necessary “contrasts” to God’s work of redemption exposing the wisdom and love of God in pursuing his people. The second strategy looks at the operations of secular forces as necessary “preparatory” agents in history to make the operation of redemption more attractive.16 Either way, social and political forces are portrayed as necessary (even if unwitting) partners to accomplishing God’s work of redemption. Edwards explicitly identified the role of the rise of Greek and Roman civilization as “more swiftly

12 The sermons Dangers of Decline, Envious Men, God Makes Men Sensible of their Misery, and Christians a Chosen Generation, and State of Public Affairs explicitly targeted social issues, see WJE 17. 13 WJE 17:93. 14 WJE 17:114. 15 WJE 17:353. 16 Gerald McDermott and Michael McClymond, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 188.

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propagating the gospel through the whole [world].”17 Secular government, according to Edwards’s view of history, played a central role in promoting the work of redemption.

8.3

Light and Darkness—The Cosmic Struggle

Another thread that stitches these sermons together is the theme of darkness and light. Historical cycles when the gospel advanced are cast as seasons of light; cycles of retreat are considered dark times in Edwards’s view of history. This account begins by describing the darkness Adam and Eve introduced through sin.18 While God gave the light of the Scriptures to Israel, Edwards continued to draw on the language of darkness to describe the Gentiles: …mankind were utterly insufficient to deliver themselves from that gross darkness and misery and subjection to the devil that they had fallen into. That it might appear that all the wisdom of the philosophers and the wisest men that the heathen had among ’em could not deliver [them] from their darkness, for the greater glory to Jesus Christ who when he came enlightened and delivered them by his glorious gospel.19

Gentiles were in darkness, not because they lacked the light of reason but because they lacked the Word of God. As this passage demonstrates, many of the great philosophers had the light of reason, yet it was of little benefit to them. Reason was a gift of God, but without the light which came from the Scriptures, true Enlightenment lie out of reach.20 Edwards used the imagery of darkness to describe the advance of Roman Catholicism in A History of the Work of Redemption. Edwards accused Roman Catholic priests of actively removing the Scriptures from the people in order to promote their own privilege. In other words, the clergy removed the light of Scripture leaving the church in darkness. He used strong language—superstitious, barbarous, and ignorant—to describe the papists: And so great was the darkness that learning almost ceased out of the world—the very priests themselves, most of ’em, barbarously ignorant as to any commendable learning or any other knowledge than their hellish craft in oppressing and tyrannizing over the souls of the poor people. The superstition and wickedness of the church of Rome kept growing worse and worse, till the very time of the Reformation. …and some others who were also sunk into great darkness and gross superstition…21 17 18 19 20 21

WJE 9:277. WJE 9:133. WJE 9:180. WJE 9:400. WJE 9:414.

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While Edwards used the term “ignorant” to describe Catholic priests, he accuses the Roman church of wickedness, oppression, and tyranny actively concealing the light of the Scriptures. Only with the advent of the Reformation and its emphasis on sola scriptura was this light restored. But the harshest rhetoric was reserved for the Pope equating him with the prophesied antichrist in the book of Revelation.22 Edwards interpreted Biblical prophecies concerning the Antichrist as referring to the Pope who was to wage war with Christ and the people of God. The theme of light and darkness in the A History of the Work of Redemption describes a cosmic framework of good and evil within which Edwards and eighteenth-century New England understood their context.

8.4

New England Prepares for War

Within a couple years of presenting this vision of history to Northampton, the fires of revival waxed anew. As Edwards and Whitefield fanned a new flame of revival, the colonies found themselves at war with Spain, another Catholic power. The British engagements with Spain—known as the War of Jenkin’s Ear (1739– 48)—centered around the southern colonies, but caught the attentive apocalyptic eye of Edwards.23 As 1744 approached, New England shifted its attention from the revivals fueled by Edwards and Whitefield toward the impending conflict with France.24 When war fell upon the Connecticut River Valley, Edwards’s benefactor, confidant, and uncle—Col. John Stoddard—led the defense of the western frontier. Northampton herself was refortified and fitted with mounts for defense. Militias mustered and Edwards’s congregation braced itself for another wave of assaults, scouting parties, and captives—the darkness of the French Catholics and their proselytized Native allies would soon cast another shadow over the valley. This conflict served as another opportunity in which Col. Stoddard sought to participate in Edwards’s brand of evangelical piety. While Edwards was a product of his martial context, his apocalyptic vision of history provided a framework within which public servants such as Stoddard understood their task. One episode in particular—Col. Stoddard’s commitment to the in-

22 WJE 9:412. 23 Between 1741 and 1743, Edwards preached five sermons on military themes, including “God’s Care for His Servants in Times of Public Calamities” (WJE 22:344), “the Curse of Meroz” (WJE 22:493), and “…How Christ is the Lord of Hosts…” (WJEO 61). 24 In spring 1744, while war with Spain continued at a low level, Britain and France declared war. This new conflict, known as King George’s War in the colonies, was not directly connected to the War of Jenkin’s Ear and quickly eclipsed the conflict with Spain, especially in New England.

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vasion of Canada—serves as an illustration of the application of Edwards’s theological agenda. When word of renewed hostilities between England and France reached Governor Shirley on June 2nd 1744, he called upon the speaker of the General Assembly, Col. John Stoddard. Within forty-eight hours, Shirley commissioned Stoddard to lead a delegation to negotiate with the Six Nations in Albany. When this band of public servants arrived on June 11th, 1744 they met Governor Clinton and a New York delegation to enlist the assistance of the Iroquois Confederacy against Britain’s colonial rival. The most curious episode in this negotiation was the unexpected appearance of the Caughnawaga representatives. These Jesuit educated French Indians arrived to announce their official neutrality in the coming conflict which became known as King George’s War (1744–1747). This war was the next in a series of inter-colonial conflicts pitting the British Protestant succession against the French “papists.” The Caughnawaga’s sudden and unsolicited declaration sparked a skeptical reaction from an experienced soldier and diplomat like John Stoddard. Writing to Major Williams on June 15th, Stoddard expressed his feeling that this declaration is “a French trick to quiet us.”25 In this same letter, Stoddard relates to Williams that while the mayor of Albany believed there were no hostile Indians in the area, there were reports that fifty Frenchmen had already fortified Crown Point.26 This curious episode illustrates the importance of Crown Point—a small but strategic French fortification on the western banks of Lake Champlain—to the inter-colonial conflicts throughout the eighteenth-century. The French and Indian encampment served as the base of operations for several French sponsored forays into the British Empire in North America (including the Caghnawaga foray into this negotiation). The not-too-distant memories of the reduction of Deerfield and other raids renewed generational anxieties of French and Indian hostilities throughout the Connecticut River Valley. Capturing Crown Point would not only deprive the French of their staging ground for periodic sorties but could serve as the British foothold for the invasion of Canada itself. As early as fall of 1744, Governor Shirley commissioned Col. Stoddard with extending the line of fortifications along the western frontier and enlisting soldiers to man these forts preventing future invasions. Stoddard and Shirley then turned to a more ambitious strategy: the invasion of Canada and the final defeat of French forces in North America. From the pulpits of New England, this inter-colonial conflict took on distinctly religious rhetoric. Military historians Douglas Edward Leach

25 Judd Mss 4:45. 26 Judd Mss 4:45.

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and Howard Peckham both commented that these conflicts took on the “coloring of a crusade.”27

8.5

Edwards’s Martial Preaching

Framing war with the French in terms of spiritual competition echoed throughout the sermons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jonathan Edwards added a harmony to this familiar melody; he integrated the spiritual dimension of warfare with his approach to revival and society set against the backdrop of King George’s War. The outbreak of inter-colonial war with France served as the occasion for a series of sermons addressing the Christian’s role in warfare in light of Edwards’s apocalyptic vision of history. Edwards preached a sermon entitled The Duties of Christians in a Time of War on April 4th, 1745—the fast day preceding the British expedition to Louisburg. In this sermon, Edwards argued that it is not only permissible for the Christian to engage in war, but war should be prosecuted vigorously in order to bring it to a swift and proper end: “it is their duty to prosecute [that war] in such a manner as tends most effectually to obtain this end, not barely to stand on their defense when their enemies actually assault them…If it be a duty of [a people to] wage war, ’tis a duty to prosecute it with vigor.”28 While almost two dozen of his parishioners had joined the expedition, Edwards encouraged the rest of the congregation to participate by praying together for God’s providences.29 In August 1745, Edwards’s preached a sermon occasioned by the return of Northampton’s victors from Louisburg on Cape Breton, New France.30 Undoubtedly, Northampton parishioners such as MAJ Seth Pomeroy returned with tales of the victory allowing Edwards to provide a fairly detailed account of the capture of the French fort. Edwards continued to demonstrate how each step was clear and incontrovertible evidence of the blessing, mercy, and providence of God–Northampton’s prayers were answered. Edwards employed this same providential approach in a letter “To a Correspondent in Scotland” dated November 1745 in which Edwards offers another detailed account of the providence of the Cape Breton expedition.31 By framing the conflict in these providential terms, Edwards cast the victory as a religious competition. What made Edwards’s 27 Douglas Edward Leach. Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America 1607–1763, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1973), 141; Howard Peckham, The Colonial Wars 1689–1762, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 100. 28 WJE 25:133. 29 WJE 25:135. 30 WJEO 63. 31 WJE 16:180–197.

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approach innovative was how he integrated this commonly held providential framework with his theology of revival and the church. The unfolding events of the fall of 1745 through the fall of 1746 would provide Edwards further opportunity to outline his conceptual framework. In October 1745, Col. Stoddard—along with the Massachusetts and New York delegations— continued his quest to secure the commitment of the Iroquois to join the British war effort. A tenuous Mohawk commitment to support New England was fraught with the usual caveats: the need to consult allies (a process that takes months), the question whether or not young Mohawk warriors would consent to go to war, and the frustration of a New York delegation bent on derailing the process. This tepid commitment from the Iroquois sachems did not encourage Col. Stoddard. However, Col. Stoddard left those negotiations with enough assurances to prompt Governor Shirley to write the Duke of Newcastle with an ambitious plan to invade Canada. While waiting for a reply from Britain, the French retaliated against the British by launching a raid from Crown Point reducing Saratoga in November of 1745. Whether it was this raid, the Jacobite Rebellion in Britain, or a general desire to rid the colonies of the French, London endorsed Shirley’s plans for invasion.32 New England was to raise 8200 troops while Britain would supply nine battalions and naval support. Shirley authorized Col. Stoddard to raise the necessary troops and Edwards lent the weight of his pulpit to the war effort. In June of 1746, Edwards preached “Preceding the Expedition to Canada” in what can be characterized as an enlistment sermon.33 Prosecuting war is not merely permissible (as his first wartime sermon argued), it is an imperative. The invasion of Canada is required to defend their land and their church, to “overthrow a considerable part of mystical Babylon,”34 and will be a blessing to the parents who allow their children to fight. Edwards cautioned that the concerns of this world and one’s personal affairs should not prevent young men from discharging their duty; Edwards stated, ”…if the People of this Land should by an extraordinary Backwardness neglect this opportunity & should abide at home in our Tents to attend our Husbandry & attend private Business tis to be feard they would not be in Gods way nor in the way of his Blessing.”35 While this sermon echoed the religious melody which provincial New England sang in times of war, his next wartime sermon introduced the harmony. 32 Leach argues in Arms for Empire that it is because the British army defeated the Jacobite forces at Culloden that it was free to divert more resources to the American theater, see Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 250. This would be a direct extension of anti-papist military action. 33 WJEO 64. 34 WJEO 64. 35 WJEO 64.

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Despite Edwards’s emotional appeal, enlistments trickled in slower than Governor Shirley expected. In July of 1746, Edwards preached another martial sermon occasioned by the “Fast Day for the Invasion of Canada.” In this sermon, Edwards situated his present conflict within the apocalyptic framework of Revelation chapter 17. Edwards applied the imagery of the beast and the Antichrist explicitly to the Pope, to Catholic forces in general, and French Canada specifically. Edwards stated that there are two means by which the Antichrist can be defeated: spiritually and temporally. Here Edwards integrates his theology of war with his theology of revival. Edwards states: They should do those things of a sp[iritual] nature that have a Tendency to it promoting the Interest of Relig[ion] in the Protestant Ch[urc]h. Endeavouring to promote a Revival of Religion…[Chris]tians should seek the overthrow of anti[Christ] by using temporal means when Called in provid[ence] a temporal to war with Anti[chris]tian Powers.36

Here, Edwards treats the advance of the gospel through revival and through the sword as a cooperative mission towards a shared goal. War in Edwards’s conceptual framework was not merely a vehicle for promoting the British Empire, but a means by which one advances the Kingdom of God. Since the advance of the Kingdom of God and the defeat of Antichristian forces were inextricably linked in his conceptual framework, Edwards required a close collaboration between ministers and magistrates to realize this grand vision. This thread can be traced through Edwards’s pre-revival sermons in Northampton which addressed social and economic issues through his series A History of the Work of Redemption to its particular expression during King George’s War.37 In many of Edwards wartime sermons, he mentioned the role of civil magistracy in accomplishing God’s ends. In Duties of Christians in a Time of War, Edwards claims that the outcome of the Louisburg expedition was the concern of both ministers and magistrates.38 In his August 1745 sermon occasioned by the return of troops from Louisburg, Edwards states that ministers and magistrates are both leaders of the people and cooperate in their purposes. Edwards explicitly joins the purposes of these two groups in his recruitment sermon of June 1746 stating that God has appointed one means for defending both society and the church—the civil magistracy. Military officers are, in the words of Edwards, “god’s ministers” when they operate out of a regard for the interests of God.39 Warfare as a Christian duty, warfare as a vehicle for the advance 36 WJEO 64. 37 Edwards would continue to preach several sermons addressing these issues during the Seven Years War, but those sermons are beyond the scope of this essay. 38 WJE 25:137. 39 WJEO 64.

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of the gospel, and the necessity of collaboration between ministers and magistrates—this was the conceptual framework within which Col. John Stoddard understood his role as a public servant.

8.6

Planning the Expedition

The correspondence between Col. Stoddard and John Lydius illustrates how Edwards’s conceptual framework informed Col. Stoddard’s military strategy. The winter of 1745–46 began with the raid on Saratoga launched from Crown Point and resulted in a shift in focus and personnel from the eastern front along the banks of Nova Scotia to the western frontier along the banks of the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers. Stoddard ensured that the forts he constructed were manned properly; the General Assembly authorized the creation of a unit of “snow-shoe men” to range the frontier; and in May of 1746, Britain authorized the recruitment of units for the invasion of Canada. Unfortunately, this recruitment drive did not come close to providing the 8200 troops Britain expected of the colonies. By August of 1746, enlistments had been slow but Governor Shirley expressed his commitment to continue with the plan to capture Crown Point in a letter to the Duke of Newcastle (August 24) as well as his correspondence with Governor Wentworth (August 25).40 However, a couple weeks later, Governor Shirley became convinced that the French were preparing to retake Louisburg and possibly other parts of Nova Scotia. While reiterating his commitment to the reduction of Crown Point, Shirley recommended in his speech to the Assembly on September 9th that troops be diverted from the western frontier to Louisburg.41 In a letter dated the following day (Sept. 10th), the Massachusetts Assembly reiterated their priority was the invasion of Canada, but allowed Shirley to temporarily divert troops to the eastern front.42 This left Col. Stoddard with an uncertain alliance with the Iroquois and the responsibility to billet the first wave of enlistees while hoping to add to their number. In a letter to John Stoddard dated November 24th 1746, Col John Lydius of Albany expressed his commitment to the capture of Crown Point. Among the reports of French movements against Annapolis Royal and Louisburg, there was rumor that the French were reinforcing Crown Point. Lydius related the various activities of the Mohawk leader, Hendrick of Canajoharie, and concluded, “but 40 William Shirley, The Correspondence of William Shirley, The Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander in America 1731–1760 (volume 1. ed. Charles Henry Lincoln. New York: Macmillan, 1912), 343. 41 Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Co.), 23:171. 42 Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 23:171.

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the Indians universally seem very much inclined to join our army and assist in destroying the same.”43 Despite the diversion of troops, Governor Shirley supported Stoddard’s efforts and the Assembly authorized the payment of scalp bounties to keep the Mohawks motivated while Massachusetts slowly gathered the full British force.44 Furthermore, in an exchange of letters in March of 1747, Stoddard asked, “whither it would be acceptable to six nations to send one or two missionaries amongst them to instruct their children and preach to those people.”45 Lydius relayed the Mohawks’s appreciation for the concern for their welfare and “would be very glad to embrace the opportunity.” By this point in time, the Mohawks had already pledged their support to the British cause, therefore, this request seems like an attempt to align the Mohawks with the apocalyptic purposes reflected in Edwards’s framework. By the end of the winter, Lydius kept Stoddard appraised of intelligence from Crown Point as Stoddard inquired of the mood of the Iroquois. Col. Stoddard was concerned—with good reason—that delays might discourage Mohawk cooperation.

8.7

Salvaging the Expedition

In his letter dated March 26th, 1747, Lydius described reconnaissance missions undertaken by joint Mohawk and British forces of Crown Point.46 This would have been the final stage preceding an attack on the fort. However, rumors of trouble continued to brew in the east. Boston caught wind of a significant effort to retake Fortress Louisbourg stirring Shirley to take stock of his resources and priorities47. Enlistments were simply too slow to guarantee the necessary forces to take Crown Point and invade Canada. It was decided in April that many of the troops Col. Stoddard recruited and billeted would be redeployed to the east to fortify Louisbourg.48 This was a clear sign from Boston that defending the western frontier was no longer a priority. Furthermore, this news caused unrest among the Mohawks as Lydius stated in his letter to Stoddard of May 5th, 1747. Unrest grew into “a general tumult (rather a rebellion)”; without the supplies and funds from Boston, the officers commanding the groups of Indians lost control “having no more command than a slave over his master.”49 The Mohawks took this 43 John Lydius to John Stoddard, 20, 24 November, 1746, in Massachusetts Historical Society Photostats. 44 Journals of the House, 23:295. 45 John Stoddard to John Lydius, 9 March 1747, in Massachusetts Historical Society Photostats. 46 John Stoddard to John Lydius, 9 March 1747, in Massachusetts Historical Society Photostats. 47 Journals of the House, 23:241. 48 Journals of the House, 23:364. 49 John Lydius to John Stoddard, 5 May 1747, in Massachusetts Historical Society Photostats.

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redeployment of troops as a reflection of Boston’s attitude toward the value of their diplomatic relations. However, unwilling to abandon the plan to reduce Crown Point, Stoddard hatched a plan which would depend almost exclusively on Mohawk forces to invade Canada. Instead of relying on European conventions of war and the logistics upon which it depends, Stoddard petitioned Shirley to provide the funds to outfit and pay 100 Mohawk “Christians” for the invasion of Crown Point.50 Most immediately, this action would deny the French and Native forces their staging ground for the molestation of the Connecticut River Valley. It would also demonstrate to Shirley the feasibility of proceeding with plans to invade Canada. As summer turned into fall and winter, Stoddard and Lydius continued to discuss the possibility of an invasion of Canada but to no avail. In a letter to Lydius on November 2nd, 1747 Stoddard indicated that he is waiting for a reply from the Governor concerning his plan to take Crown Point: “I have often given my opinion to our Governor about Crown Point and about the reduction of Canada which I don’t take to be a very difficult task, in case the Governments were agreed.”51 No such attack was ever to take place.

8.8

Conclusion: An “Enlightened” Theology of Warfare

Stoddard’s dedication to the invasion of Canada persisted for a year after he lost logistical and political support for the invasion. Sluggish enlistments, the burden of billeting an ineffective force, and mounting anxieties on the eastern front of the conflict drove a shift in strategic priorities which made Col. Stoddard’s plan to remove the French from the St. Lawrence unlikely if not impossible. Military logic or political expediency do not seem sufficient to explain Stoddard’s dedication to this strategy. However, when read against Edwards’s conceptual framework, this dedication can be seen as the collaboration between magistrate and minister to remove the threat of heresy casting a shadow over the Connecticut River Valley. An examination of Edwards’s early sermons, his History of the Work of Redemption series, and his wartime sermons reflect a vision of history cast in apocalyptic terms. Heathenism, heterodoxy, and heresy—Edwards sought their “enlightenment” through the advance of the gospel by means of revival. Oftentimes, according to Edwards. this advance required the support of public servants in the magistracy; this need was nowhere more evident than New England’s 50 John Lydius to John Stoddard, 5 May 1747, in Massachusetts Historical Society Photostats. 51 John Lydius to John Stoddard, 2 November 1747, in Massachusetts Historical Society Photostats.

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northern border in shadow of papism. Col. Stoddard demonstrated a commitment to this brand of religiosity throughout his life. In the eulogy for his uncle, Edwards stated that Stoddard’s attachment to “experimental piety” was not a political expedient but a matter “of his own experience.”52 Col. Stoddard applied this attachment through his roles as a public servant. He relied on his capacity as a Commissioner of Indian Affairs to support the mission to the Housatonic Indians; in his role as Justice of the Peace, Stoddard intervened in the ordination of Robert Breck to prevent a challenge to traditional Calvinist belief in Hampshire County; his position as selectman and town moderator allowed Stoddard to support an Edwardsean agenda in the Bad Book Affair. Similarly, Stoddard understood his role as commander of the western militia within Edwards’s conceptual framework. According to Edwards, ministers and magistrates alike had a duty to collaborate in order to promote the advance of the gospel. Col. John Stoddard’s curious and peculiar devotion to the capture of Crown Point, as reflected in his correspondence with John Lydius, is best understood not in military or political terms, but as an expression of his deeply held evangelical religious sensibilities. In her insightful study of colonial American violence, Susan Juster traces the medieval European origins of various expressions of violence into the New World.53 While these medieval attitudes were undoubtedly transplanted into colonial practice, the scope of her study precludes acknowledging the ways in which Enlightenment thought also contributed to expressions of violence. Edwards did not consider his adoption of Enlightenment discourse and moral sensibilities at odds with the use of violence and warfare to achieve his ends. In fact, Enlightenment narratives of progress and civility may have contributed to the use of such measures. Edwards clearly thought that violence and warfare were proper means to accomplish theological ends. In as much as Col. John Stoddard is a reflection of Edwards’s religious ideology, he represents a group of magistrates who gave religious—even apocalyptic—significance to their role as public servant bringing light into a dark world.

52 WJE 25:328. 53 Susan Juster, Sacred Violence in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Russell J. Allen (Liberty University)

Children as “White Paper” Jonathan Edwards and Enlightenment Childhood

9.1

Introduction

In 1890 Oliver Wendell Holmes classified the teachings of Jonathan Edwards as “Ancient barbarism.”1 Edwards had been dead for well over a century, yet the implications of his Calvinism continued to haunt theological minds throughout the proceeding generations. To Holmes and many others, Edwards was a brilliant theologian and philosopher who was restrained by ideology that had not yet evolved into modernity. Central to Holmes’ critique was Edwards’s old and outdated view of childhood. Once labeling them “vipers” and “heirs of hell,” Edwards’s ideas about children were no longer relevant to the commonsensical new age.2 His belief in original sin and infant damnation paled in comparison to the more ethical emphasis on childhood beauty, helplessness, and ignorance. Holmes and his contemporaries shared a more ‘enlightened’ view of childhood that appeared very different from traditional Puritanism. They likely would have assented to the ideology of one eighteenth-century philosopher who stated that “Little children are innocent and harmless,” and that young people are like flowers in full bloom.3 Rather than a theology that believed unregenerate children deserved to burn in hell, Holmes and others would have agreed with the author that everyone “should become as little children, in order to our entering into the kingdom of God.”4 After all, children were like “white paper,” who come into the world without “any judgment already formed or habit contracted.”5 1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes: Over the Teacups: 1895, vol. 4 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1899), 40. 2 WJE 4:394. 3 WJE 13:349. WJEO 22:322. 4 WJE 2:117. 5 WJE 47:251.

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Perhaps Holmes, along with many others, would be surprised to find that the author whose previous descriptions so articulately captured an Enlightenment view of childhood was none other than Edwards himself. Based on the disapproval that Edwards received for his childhood theology after his death, it seems likely that later critics were unaware of his more Lockean rhetoric about children. Consequently, Edwards’s view of childhood remains largely misunderstood. Although Edwards never wrote a specific treatise on the theology of childhood, his complicated and seemingly contradictory ideas about children are a prominent focus in many of his works. This chapter will argue that Edwards attempted to reconcile traditional Calvinist childhood ideas with new ideas popularized by the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. While the reconciliation was often imperfect, it did prevent Edwards from partaking in the “darker” extremes of both ideologies. To Edwards, children were sinners yet impressionable, flawed yet beautiful, and undisciplined yet reasonable. They were to be respected as persons and taught to understand the world that God created.

9.2

From Puritan Childhood to Enlightenment Childhood

Edwards lived in the middle of what most historians consider to be the most important childhood era. Religious revivals of the eighteenth century, comprised of many youths, along with the increased popularity of Enlightenment ideals, led to unparalleled levels of intellectual depth regarding childhood.6 However, the rise of Enlightenment philosophy eventually usurped Calvinist modes of thinking, leaving in its wake the foundation for modern views of childhood.7 From a Puritan perspective, childhood was fundamentally tied to the concept of original sin.8 Beginning at conception, all people possessed a sinful nature and flawed disposition, eternally separating them from God. The inherent sinfulness of humanity could be seen in its clearest and most natural form through children. For Puritans, godliness increased with age – God looked like an old man.9 As a result, New England parents sought to rid their children of sinful tendencies as 6 Historian George Marsden notes that young people were a key factor in many of the eighteenth-century revivals, especially so in Northampton, where he writes, “It all began with the young people.” See Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 150. 7 Allison James and Alan Prout, eds., Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: Routledge, 1990), 36–37. 8 Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 11. 9 David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 35.

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soon as possible by dedicating them to God’s covenant with the community and baptizing them within two weeks of their birth.10 In the late seventeenth century, however, John Locke began to popularize the idea that children were not naturally depraved, but were rather blank slates, free from the corruption of sinful society. By the nineteenth century, the perceived malleability of children transitioned into a more Romanticized version in which children were seen as inherently good. Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned against the perils of exposing children to harsh adult realities, such as sexuality and death. In an attempt to preserve childhood innocence, the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a notable increase in schools, children’s hospitals, and orphanages. Many children also remained in the care of their parents throughout early adulthood.11 The Enlightenment’s challenge to original sin resulted in a number of other transitions in childhood ideology. Unable to walk or talk, children were once viewed to be in an animalistic state, indicative of their inherent depravity. Puritan parents enacted strict rules that were intended to prepare children for adulthood.12 Valuing proper etiquette and behavior, young people were required to bow in the presence of their parents and expected to refrain from an excess of frivolous activities.13 Conversely, the eighteenth century produced a change in general sentiments toward children. Parents expressed a pleasure and fondness towards their children that had previously been masked by disciplinarian attitudes.14 Rather than viewed as animalistic, children were seen as persons capable of serious thought and purposeful action.15 Childhood was a distinct stage in life that should be celebrated and encouraged through creativity and play.16 Consequentially, the Protestant concept of “breaking the will” through physical punishment was minimized in favor of speaking to children rationally.17 Locke 10 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 15–16. Mintz notes how all children, regardless of gender, were dressed in large gowns to prevent them from crawling. Many were placed in large wooden carts that served the same purpose as modern-day walkers. 11 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 76–77. 12 Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: University Press of New England, 1992), 52. 13 Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 101. 14 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 40. 15 Adriana S. Benzaquén, “Childhood, Identity and Human Science in the Enlightenment.” History Workshop Journal, no. 57 (Spring 2004): 39–40. 16 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 52. 17 “Breaking the will” refers to the concept in which parents used corporal punishment to conform children to their desired principles. While this sometimes led to abuse, it was most common to strike them on the buttocks. See Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 98–99. Fischer notes how this terminology was not exclusive to New Englanders but was common among clergy east of England and Calvinists from the Netherlands to Hungary.

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believed that the best way to foster self-efficacy in children was to nurture their “powers of reason.”18 Similarly, Rousseau sought to purify morals through reason in an attempt to promote a just society.19 Although most scholars view the transition from a Puritan to Enlightenment view of childhood as a positive societal good, not all consequences were beneficial. Many historians are quick to point out the culture of fear, repression, and shame that arose from intense Calvinist doctrines regarding children.20 But just as extremes existed within Calvinism, so did extremes exist within the Enlightenment. By stressing the inherent goodness of children and assigning them greater autonomy, patriarchy was diminished, and authority was challenged. According to David Foster, Lockean liberalism limited parental power by emphasizing the independence and equality of children once they reached a certain age.21 In Foster’s view, “Locke hopes to prevent fathers from acting like kings and – this is just as important – to prevent kings from acting like fathers.”22 While Lockean principles of power had helpful political implications for American colonists, authoritative control over children sometimes grew murky. Along with several similar instances was a student rebellion that occurred at Yale College in 1745. After remonstrating what they deemed to be arbitrary rules, two young brothers were expelled. As a result, their classmates protested the expulsion by publishing Locke’s Essay on Toleration (1689), indicating the weighty influence of Lockean liberalism.23 A more sinister expression of attitudes toward childhood occurred on the fringes of Enlightenment thought. Rousseau’s proposition that human fulfillment necessitated a return to God’s nature intrigued a burgeoning scientific community.24 If children represented the purest form of human expression, and should be devoid of societal influence, perhaps they could be observed and studied in this environment. Several French Enlightenment philosophers, including Montesquieu, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis, hypothesized that the secrets of human nature could be discovered through the rearing of children in isolation. 18 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 58–59. 19 Philipp Blom, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 203–204. 20 Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 64, 172, 133. Also see Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 20. The negative consequences of Calvinist attitudes towards children are often exaggerated. Marsden notes that Puritan child-rearing practices often varied from household to household, and most were not devoid of signs of love and affection. 21 David Foster, “Taming the Father: John Locke’s Critique of Patriarchal Fatherhood,” The Review of Politics 56, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 646. 22 Foster, “Taming the Father,” 646. 23 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 72.; See also John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 24 Blom, A Wicked Company, 203–204.

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Scientific study could reveal if man was naturally good or evil, the origin of language and ideas, and the cause of personality.25 In January of 1800 the Parisian press reported that a “wild boy” had been captured in Aveyron. Several prominent French philosophers requested to observe the boy in his “natural state” and record their findings. Unfortunately for them, their work with the boy could not be separated from his assimilation into society. Historian Adriana S. Benzaquén concludes that “in the science of childhood, observation would be inseparable from intervention; the child could only be known as he or she was being transformed.”26 Although unsuccessful, the eagerness in which Enlightenment scientists were willing to isolate a child for study, reveals an irony that plagued more radical thinkers. In an attempt to understand the foundations of personhood in children, they were willing to forsake the rights that personhood supposedly implied. In both France and England, the Enlightenment also included the use of children for cultic and spiritual services. During the late 1770’s, séances, or “sittings” for group committees, business gatherings, and religious meetings sometimes embraced Masonic traditions, including the use of children for special roles.27 Based on the theory of childhood innocence and inherent goodness, children took on intermediary responsibilities for communication with the divine realm. Utilized for the spiritual needs of the community, children were often revered to the point of exploitation. Although the practice of child mediums was intended to defuse the criticism of skeptics, it may have done just the opposite.28

9.3

Edwards and Enlightened Views of Childhood

Jonathan Edwards never lived to see many of the fruits of Enlightenment childhood philosophy, but his interactions reveal him to be a transitional figure during the rapidly changing eighteenth century. The New England establishment did not unequivocally dismiss all aspects of the Moderate Enlightenment in America and thus Calvinist interactions with Enlightenment principles created a paradox that was difficult to articulate.29 In many ways, Edwards became not only the eighteenth century’s greatest articulator of this paradox, but also offered the finest attempts to reconcile it. 25 Benzaquén, “Childhood, Identity and Human Science in the Enlightenment,” 51. 26 Benzaquén, “Childhood, Identity and Human Science in the Enlightenment,” 53. 27 John V. Fleming. The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 232. 28 Fleming. The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, 233. 29 Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 46–48.

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Children were a central part of Edwards’s preaching and writing because he understood the importance they held for society as a whole. It was in children that the complexities of human depravity, innocence, and faith could best be understood. They were the future of society, and as a pastor, Edwards held a special responsibility for their eternal state. For many years, Puritans had exhorted the younger generations to live piously, and Edwards sought to uphold this legacy by preserving the New England Way.30 Increases in sexual immorality and carnal pleasures heightened his concern for society, and Edwards recognized that reform had to begin with the youth. The religious revivals that brought Edwards to international prominence can only be explained through this context. His A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God revealed that God’s covenant with New England was still intact, and thanks to the youthfulness of its participants, would be for many years to come. The centrality of youth to Edwards and his Puritan background fit in seamlessly with the Enlightenment’s increased interest in childhood. As with many other topics, Edwards saw in Enlightened childhood philosophy new ways to make sense of his traditional beliefs. Nonetheless, it becomes easy to read into Edwards too grand a narrative. Edwards likely never intended to place himself in such a lofty historical position. In fact, it is ironically Edwards’s practical pastoral role that most reveals his genius. His comments about childhood were not written as a grand topical discourse but were rather necessitated by local circumstances and common attitudes. As a result, Edwards’s view of childhood cannot be explained without understanding its immediate context. Optimistic views of human nature, although not new, became popularized with the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.31 Historian George Marsden asserts that the doctrine of original sin “was one of the chief points on which eighteenth-century Calvinists were at odds with their optimistic era.”32 In 1740, dissenting minister John Taylor published his widely popular and controversial The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination. An early adherent to traditional orthodoxy, Taylor came to question the Calvinist doctrine of original sin. While the treatise itself is long and 30 The New England Way is used by historian Harry S. Stout to denote the comprehensive organizational structure of society in New England based on the Puritan religion. Puritans believed that society was organized into a series of covenants that required total obedience to God’s Word in order to bring about divine blessing. See Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 31 As early as the late fourth century, theologians such as Pelagius suggested that humanity did not lose its moral ability to do good after Adam’s fall. Pelagius believed that people are not born good or bad but are free to act in any way. To him, human nature was not inherently corrupt. 32 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 451.

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complex, Taylor notes several objections to original sin as they pertain to infants and children, including the “natural good qualities” that they possess and Jesus’ warm welcome of them.33 Taylor’s attack on original sin gained a great deal of publicity and influence. It became such a threat to orthodoxy that Jonathan Edwards was given a copy by his trans-Atlantic connection, John Erskine. Edwards saw in Taylor’s arguments the ugly head of Arminianism, which he feared was taking root in New England.34 He believed that Taylor’s heretical teaching undermined the ultimate sovereignty of God and would consequently abolish the New England Way. Edwards’s response to Taylor left little doubt regarding his loyalties to Calvinist orthodoxy. His doctrine of original sin hinges on the belief that supernatural principles have been erased due to original sin, but lower principles such as self-love and love of pleasure remain. Edwards believed that without God’s infusing of divine grace upon a sinner’s heart, it was impossible for supernatural principles to appear.35 In a clear response to Taylor’s concept of childhood innocence, Edwards spends much time discussing their guilt. He points out how young children begin to sin as soon as they are capable, indicating a corrupt nature.36 As a result, children are in desperate need of salvation through regeneration of the heart. When speaking to children, Edwards often reminded them of this reality by saying that their sins go with them into eternity, and the guilt of their youthful sins does not wear out.37 Unlike later Enlightenment figures who resolved not to discuss death with their children, Edwards spoke of it often. His imagery of hell 33 John Taylor, The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (London: J. Wilson, 1740), 78–80. 34 Lauren Davis Gray, “Birthing The New Birth: The Natural Philosophy Of Childbirth In The Theology Of Jonathan Edwards” (M.A. thesis., Florida State University, 2009), 48. Arminianism was based on the teachings of sixteenth-century theologian Jacobus Arminius, who believed (among other things) that humans were capable of doing good, and that God’s grace in a soul is the continuance of this existing good. To Edwards and many others in the eighteenth-century, Arminianism came loosely to be defined as any belief that was not Calvinist. 35 WJE 3:381. As Anri Morimoto notes, Edwards’s use of the word “infusion” was a deliberate choice. It was a Catholic term that stood in opposition to the more Protestant usage of “illumination” or “imputation.” Edwards chose the Catholic term in order to distinguish himself from Arminian ideology that emphasized personal merit in grace, which could be implied from “illumination.” However, despite terminology, Edwards’s concept of grace remained identical to Calvin, who saw that grace operates upon the whole personality. In this way, infusion of grace resulted in a changed disposition. Edwards also saw usefulness in the term “infusion” to support his idea that God’s grace “unites the division of understanding and will.” See Anri Morimoto, Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 20–25. 36 WJE 3:200. 37 WJEO 48:274.

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and tactics of terror may seem harsh for children, Edwards believed that they were necessary in order for children to repent and willingly turn to God. He struck fear into his listeners in order to make the comfort of the gospel more appealing.38 Interestingly, it was Edwards conception of dual principles regarding original sin that gave him a connection to one of the Enlightenment’s most prominent figures, John Locke. In Locke’s 1689 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he asserts that children’s minds are like “white paper.” In order to gain knowledge, the mind had to have actual ideas of things learned and known. True knowledge was predicated on stimuli of the physical world.39 Despite Locke’s empiricist tendencies, Edwards found much to admire in the Essay. As Edwards’s early biographer Samuel Hopkins notes, Edwards read Locke with “more pleasure than the most greedy miser, when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly discovered treasure.”40 Edwards used Locke’s ideology to make sense of both sin and grace. As mentioned, Edwards’s doctrine of original sin meant that humans were devoid of supernatural principles from conception. In the same way that Locke proposed knowledge could be gained from natural ideas, Edwards proposed that grace was the manifestation of “a new simple idea.”41 David Laurence summarizes that for Edwards, “The mind of the spiritual person operates with an added capacity, supernaturally given, that serves as the foundation for entirely different possibilities of knowledge of God, and of things as they stand related to God.”42 Edwards found in Locke a way to conceptualize the restoration of divine principles in depraved humans. While Locke’s concept of “white paper” was used in later years by Enlightenment figures to combat the harshness of Calvinist ideology, Edwards used it to combat the Enlightenment implications of man’s inherently neutral–or even good–nature. In Edwards’s estimation, the phrase “white paper” did not nullify the doctrine of original sin. He seems to suggest with Locke that natural knowledge, acquired through experience, is itself a depraved condition. If children’s minds were like “white paper,” this precluded the possibility that they already possessed the supernatural principles which constituted saving grace. Given Edwards’s 38 Jonathan Edwards, “Miscellanies” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 43. 39 David Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” Early American Literature 15, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 111. 40 Paul Helm, “A Forensic Dilemma: John Locke and Jonathan Edwards on Personal Identity,” in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, ed. Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 45. 41 Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” 113. 42 Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” 115.

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nuanced understanding and utilization of Lockean principles, it is not entirely surprising that Edwards once stated that children’s “minds, as to any prepossessions or prejudices of any judgement already formed or habit contracted, are like white paper: you may write or lay what colors you will upon it.”43 Edwards saw that children were impressionable, and he called his congregation to teach and model godly principles to them as soon as possible. While many historians struggle to reconcile Edwards’s Enlightenment language with his doctrine of original sin, it is important to remember that Edwards uses children as a typology.44 In Religious Affections, Edwards states that “Little children are innocent and harmless.”45 In fact, Edwards supports his belief by using the same Bible verses that John Taylor does in his criticism of original sin, in which Jesus welcomes little children to himself.46 Innocence and trustworthiness were those traits he most desired to see in his congregation, most likely because many had shown false signs of conversion during the revivals. In Images of Divine Things, he paralleled the physical maturation from childhood to manhood with the spiritual maturation of grace in a believer.47 When viewed in this way, it seems clear that statements regarding the innocence of children in Religious Affections referred only to their physical innocence and how they are perceived relative to, and in, the minds of men. It is the children’s natural principles that point to the supernatural principles that all people should long for–again perhaps alluding to Lockean ideology. Although children are not truly innocent, they may still represent innocence. Contextualizing Edwards’s language also helps to explain why Edwards could speak of children as both vipers and flowers. In Some Thoughts Concerning Revival, Edwards famously wrote: As innocent as children seem to be to us, yet if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God’s sight, but are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers, and are in a most miserable condition, as well as grown persons; and they are naturally very senseless and stupid, being “born as the wild ass’s colt” [Job 11:12], and need much to awaken them.48

43 WJEO 47:251. Emphasis mine. 44 Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 118. Typologies are examples of natural things that Edwards perceives to have spiritual parallels. 45 WJE 2:349. 46 WJE 2:349. Edwards quotes from Matthew 19:14 which states, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” In addition, he uses similar quotations from Matthew 10:42, Matthew 18:6, and John 13:33. 47 WJE 11:54, 61. 48 WJE 4:394.

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Edwards uses rather harsh language to emphasize the utter depravity of children. Although the same language was used for adults, his words to children carried added weight because the society surrounding him, while holding to the sinfulness of adults, was quickly turning to the innocence of children. The use of animals in Edwards’s rhetoric seems to draw upon the Puritan notion that children are animalistic in nature.49 While it is likely that traditional language influenced Edwards in this and several other instances, it is also clear that while Edwards believed animalistic rhetoric could be applied to children, it in no way was limited to them. The term “viper” was one of Edwards’s favorite words to use for all people who have not received salvation, and it occurs over and over again in his sermons and writings.50 Edwards’s application of the word to children reveals not that he saw them as being particularly sinful, but that he saw them as being just as sinful–at least in the eyes of God–as adults. In fact, Edwards breaks with traditional Puritan conceptions of childhood by highlighting the increasing sinfulness of unregenerate adults. He writes, “Dispositions to evil are commonly much stronger in adult persons, than in children, when they first begin to act in the world as rational creatures.”51 Those who were unsaved actually became less-godly with age. Edwards’s belief in this principle was also influenced by his circumstances. Many older church members stood opposed to the emotionalism of the Great Awakening. This backlash created a great amount of tension between Edwards and his members. Edwards’s support of revivalism and perceived favoritism toward youth created a generational conflict that eventually contributed to his dismissal from Northampton.52 His call for childlike behavior in Religious Affections and notion of increased sin with age were clear jabs at his elderly challengers and impacted his theology. As a result, Edwards developed a theology that compared physical realities to spiritual realities. In viewing life from dual lenses (physical and spiritual) Edwards was able to emphasize the depravity of children while also highlighting their relative innocence compared to adults. For those who were truly Christians, Edwards could affirm like Puritans before him that 49 Calvert, Children in the House, 52. Pronounced examples of the Puritan notion that children are animalistic in nature can be seen in works by Cotton Mather and Michael Wigglesworth. Cotton Mather, Help for Distressed Parents, Or, Counsels & Comforts for Godly Parents Afflicted with Ungodly Children; and Warnings Unto Children to Beware of All Those Evil Courses, Which Would Be Afflictive Unto Their Parents (Boston, 1694); Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom: Or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement (1662) (New York: American News Company, 1867). 50 For more examples of Edwards using the term “vipers,” see WJEO 4:29, 423; See also WJEO 8:685. Other instances occur in sermons and works that are too numerous to list here. 51 WJE 3:137. 52 Kenneth P. Minkema, “Old Age and Religion in the Writings and Life of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 70, no. 2 (December 2001): 675.

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virtue and benevolence increased – God looked like an old man. However, for those who were not infused with divine grace, Edwards affirmed like many Enlightenment thinkers that sin and hardness of heart increased – godliness looked more like a child. Edwards’s rhetoric about children, even that which seemed animalistic, upheld the personhood of children. He not only recognized the inherent value of individual children, but also of childhood itself.53 Far from diminishing the beauty of childhood, Edwards’s doctrine of original sin actually pointed to it. Unlike many Christians of the past who saw baptism as God’s counter to original sin, Edwards believed that it was in fact childhood.54 He writes, “And God has so ordered it that we should have a free and convenient opportunity in the beginning of our lives so that we here may soon get out of that miserable condition in which we are born.”55 Childhood was specifically designed by God so that conversion could occur before hardness of heart increased. It was the best opportunity to reveal God’s regeneration in a person’s heart. This unique point of view shows the importance of childhood to Edwards. As far as conversion and regeneration were central to his thought, so too was childhood. Although Edwards did not believe children were without inherent flaws, his ideal view of childhood was every bit as romanticized as that of later Enlightenment thinkers. Edwards saw childhood as a time designed by God for great joy, full of hopes and promises.56 Edwards suggested that young people are like flowers in full bloom. It is a time of great beauty and wonder, he said, “when persons are want most to rejoice in the good things of the world.”57 Edwards’s

53 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 150–151, 300. See also Minkema, “Old Age and Religion in the Writings and Life of Jonathan Edwards,” 674. Edwards classified youth in various stages, with infants under 4 years old, and children ranging from roughly 4–14. However, with the combination of Indian hostilities, consolidated land holdings, and political antagonisms, young men often remained in the care of their parents for longer periods of time, causing Edwards to extend his last category of “young persons” from age 15–25. 54 Augustine believed that baptism itself that erased the effects of original sin. See Martha Ellen Stortz, “‘Where or When Was Your Servant Innocent?’ Augustine on Childhood,” in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), 79. Thomas Aquinas held that baptism is necessary for the “infusion of their souls,” since infants lack the “movement of their free-will.” See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1948 reprint (Westminster.: Christian Classics, 1981), Question 113 Article 3. Martin Luther concluded that it is the repetitive and metaphorical return to baptism throughout life that shows the effects of the first. See Jane E. Strohl, “The Child in Luther’s Theology: ‘For What Purpose Do We Older Folks Exist, Other Than to Care for … the Young?’,” in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), 143. 55 WJEO 46:214. 56 WJEO 22:322. 57 WJEO 22:322.

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picture of a flower seems to be especially helpful, not only because of his explicit analogy to beauty, but also his implicit analogy to fragility and delicacy. Edwards did see youth as highly impressionable. He believed the habits and lifestyle they developed were largely determined by the society around them and were often hard to erase later in life. Therefore, children must be taught to seek salvation and pursue holiness from the moment that they were born. While this may seem like a paradox given the depravity inherited by original sin, Edwards did not think that a good upbringing would rid children of sinful tendencies. Instead, he believed being surrounded by a godly society would cause them to sin less, and more importantly, increase their chances for salvation. For example, Edwards often spoke of the role that parents play in “restraining [children] from sin,” and wrote bluntly, “It may be that your children are yet unconverted and unawakened. Might it not probably have been otherwise, at least some of them, if you had done your duty towards them?”58 The special value Edwards placed on children also impacted the way that he treated them. While Edwards most likely used some form of physical punishment to discipline his own children, unlike traditional Puritans, his main purpose was not to “break their will.”59 Instead, Edwards adhered to the ideology of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers by appealing to children’s reason.60 In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke suggests that children should be exposed to reason as early as possible, when they are “most tender, most easy to be bowed.”61 After all, he writes, “as he [the child] grows more towards a man, age shows his faults the more.”62 Edwards agreed with Locke in believing that reason was the best way to promote virtuous habits. Locke’s support for this technique, he claims, is based on observation: It will perhaps be wondered, that I mention reasoning with children: and yet I cannot but think that the true way of dealing with them. They understand it as early as they do language; and, if I misobserve not, they love to be treated as rational creatures, sooner

58 WJEO 47:251. 59 See footnote 17. 60 Another Lockean influence on Edwards was English Noncomformist Philip Doddridge. His most famous work on childhood, Sermons on the Religious Education of Children, reveals numerous similarities to Edwards. In fact, Doddridge’s language about children appears so similar to Edwards, that it is not farfetched to assume Edwards derived many of his ideas from it. At one time, Edwards wrote a letter to Joseph Bellamy, giving his advice on how to best instruct Indian children. In it, Edwards tells Bellamy to bring a Doddridge book next time he visits (although it is not mentioned by name). Given the context of the letter and the similarities in language, it is quite possible Sermons on the Religious Education of Children was the book he was referring to. 61 John Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. John William Adamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 28. 62 Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, 29.

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than is imagined. ‘Tis a pride should be cherished in them, and, as much as can be, made the greatest instrument to turn them by.63

Locke supposed that any instruction or desired action in children could be obtained through commonsensical reasoning. In other words, children could be convinced that what they needed to do was what was ultimately best for them.64 Edwards took this idea and made it the heart of his rationale when speaking to young people. He believed that children are most happy when they are holy. Although people mistakenly seek pleasure in other things, they are truly most joyful when they dedicate themselves to God.65 Locke’s concept of motivation through reason also influenced Edwards. Locke asserts that reputation can be a preliminary motivation for virtue because of the positive feedback gained by it. While this is good for children at first, he nevertheless states that the true principle of virtue is “knowledge of a man’s duty, and the satisfaction it is to obey his Maker, in following the dictates of that light God has given him, with the hopes of acceptation and reward.”66 Locke’s point is that concerning children with mental pain and pleasure will make them more aware of the mind and spirituality. Yet, if physical punishment for children is the main focus, it will only make them more aware of fleshly things. This is why he emphasized “reputation” and “satisfaction” in obedience to God more than use of the rod, as did the older Puritans. To him, all people, children included, should learn to concentrate on the mind rather than body, and spirit rather than flesh. Edwards saw the unrealized theological implications for this idea and expanded upon them. Edwards applied Lockean principles in many of his sermons by pointing out the faults of young people and reasoning with them for improvement. Edwards once reflected, “Indeed, some young persons seem to be so inconsiderate and careless that they scarcely think or care anything about it. They seem as if they never had any serious thoughts about their salvation, and the necessity of turning to God in order to obtain it… Their minds are on other things; they are taken up with vanity.”67 Rather than condemning the children for being carefree, Edwards highlighted the wrong response of their hearts. In fact, he asserted that God designed childhood to be carefree so that children could more easily seek con-

63 Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, 64. 64 Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, 65. 65 Edwards writes that “spending youth in the practice of religion and virtue is the way to obtain pleasures that are vastly and more excellent than are to be found in the way of sin and vanity” and that “such a course doesn’t destroy young people’s comfort, or outward enjoyments, but adds to them.” WJEO 49:323. 66 Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, 43. 67 WJEO 48:274.

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version, rather than pursue vanity.68 This lack of responsibility at an early age was specifically ordered by God, so that young people would have an opportunity for early conversion.69 Edwards wrote extensively about young people’s consistent tendency to seek after pleasure. This is what they aim at: to spend their youth pleasantly. And they think that if they forsake sin and youthful vanity, and take upon themselves a religious course of life, it will hinder them in their pursuit. They look upon religion as a very dull, melancholy thing and think that, if they embrace it, they will, in a great measure, be done with pleasures.70

Edwards analyzed the behaviors of youth and placed their longings in a larger context. He believed that the tendency of youth to seek after pleasures was not only natural, but good. However, he affirmed that true pleasure could be found ultimately in God. Edwards wrote that eternal souls could only be satisfied with eternal substance. The temporary earthly pleasures that youth desired were therefore not good enough.71 Only in Jesus Christ could they find everlasting companionship and intimacy, infinite love, and eternal joy.72 Additionally, while Edwards urged youth to pursue the pleasures of God above all else, he did not condemn the use of earthly enjoyments. Rather, he stated, “Religion doesn’t forbid the use of outward enjoyments, but only the abuse of them.”73 He went on to write that these earthly enjoyments were created by God and are to be received with thanksgiving. As Edwards put it, “Vice destroys the sweetness of outward enjoyments.”74 There is even more enjoyment in store for youth when God’s gifts are used correctly in their proper context. As a result, the problem with children was not that their will needed to be broken, but that their wills needed to be redirected.

68 WJEO 46:214. 69 Although Edwards classified children as 4–14 years old and young persons as 15–25 years old, his sermons were given to both at the same time and therefore the terms “children” and “young persons” can be used synonymously regarding Edwards’s rhetoric towards them. 70 Jonathan Edwards, “The Most Direct Way to Happiness,” in To the Rising Generation, ed. Don Kistler (Lake Mary: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2005), 54. 71 WJEO 49:323. 72 WJEO 49:323. 73 WJEO 49:323. 74 WJEO 49:323.

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Edwards and the Radical Enlightenment Childhood

Edwards’s role in the more radical elements of Enlightenment childhood seems to be, if anything, only minimal. Despite Edwards’s scientific intrigue, there is no indication that he sought to experiment on children in any way or observe them in an isolated state of nature. Neither are there any instances in which Edwards uses children in ways that appear similar to French Masonic ‘mediums.; Edwards remained far from these dark extremes. Edwards, however, did possess a high view of childhood spirituality that is unusual by modern standards. The clearest example is the case of Phebe Bartlett, a four-year old girl whose conversion is exemplified in Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative. Not only does he make Bartlett’s story the capstone of his essay, but he uses it as a pinnacle example and metaphorical measuring stick for all future conversions. According to the narrative, Bartlett was in deep despair over her own sin and the prospect that she might go to Hell. Unable to be comforted by family and friends, her countenance suddenly changed, and she proceeded to cry, “the Kingdom of Heaven is come to me!”75 Full of joy, Bartlett emphatically declared “I love God! … Yes, better than anything!”76 In the following weeks, her signs of conversion became even more apparent. Edwards recorded how she heartily lamented the unsaved status of her siblings, cherished the Sabbath, desired to attend private religious meetings, attended to prayer at home, and (especially noteworthy to Edwards) “manifested great love to her minister.”77 Although perhaps as odd to modern audiences as Masonic childhood mediums, Bartlett’s story is more Puritan than Enlightened. The late seventeenth century saw several tracts published describing similar stories. James Janeway’s 1671 A Token for Children is perhaps the most popular. Janeway, an English nonconformist preacher, includes numerous fictitious accounts of childhood conversions and deathbed narratives. He describes a child between eight and nine years old who would “spend much time in reading the scripture … She was exceeding dutiful to her parents, very loth to grieve them in the least; and if she had at any time (which was very rare) offended them, she would weep bitterly.”78 To Puritans, Edwards’s account of Bartlett’s conversion would have signified God’s blessing on the community. Perhaps the closest that Edwards comes to the excesses of Enlightenment childhood is the large amount of autonomy that he ascribed to children. Edwards 75 76 77 78

WJE 4:200. WJE 4:201. WJE 4:205. James Janeway. A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children (London, 1671), Reprint (Worcester: James R. Hutchins, 1795), 8–9.

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held a high view of childhood, and as shown in the case of Phebe Bartlett, believed that even very young children could exhibit signs of divine grace. His close relationship with the youth of his town, and his belief in early conversion, also opened him up to criticism regarding the family unit. He insisted upon private meetings only for youth, and often attended them himself.79 This practice was met with some disagreement from parents in his congregation who believed, as traditional Puritans did, that they alone should exert control over their children’s lives.80 Edwards’s encouragement of these meetings and implicit suggestion that Jesus (and Edwards as Christ’s representative) should be loved more than parents, seemed to undermine the family hierarchy that was held so dear.81 In addition, Edwards’s emphasis on childhood conversion during the revivals gave an implied power to children that appeared to contradict elderly authority. Timothy Cutler, a staunch opponent of the awakening, recalled a story when a boy was commanded by his father to go into the woods and replenish the family’s supply of firewood. But the boy disobeyed the command and began to argue vehemently. Finally, he went into the barn and began to make “hideous mourning and noise” that disturbed the neighbors. Unable to calm him, the parents called in Edwards for advice. Believing that the boy was under the influence of the Spirit, Edwards told the parents to forget the demand. He saw the boy’s hysterics as a sign that he was on his way to conversion.82 In his actions, Edwards added his own heap of proverbial firewood to the already kindling generation conflict in New England. Many, such as Cutler, believed that Edwards allowed the importance of childhood conversion to undermine the hierarchical system. One of Edwards’s greatest critics, Boston’s First Church junior pastor Charles Chauncey, recounted a story told to him by a friend about a fifteen-year old girl who was converted and began to exhort her parents. She could see the “Image of the Devil” in the face of her father and declared that he “was going Post-haste down to Hell” and that all his prayers had been an “Abomination” to God.83 Such instances threatened to overthrow the hierarchical structure that held together Puritan society. While Edwards’s goal was certainly not to diminish the authority 79 Minkema, “Old Age and Religion,” 697. 80 Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patters of Child-rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 25. 81 Minkema, “Old Age and Religion,” 697. 82 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 158. As Marsden notes, Cutler recalled this story four years after it occurred, during a time when he eagerly sought to portray the awakening in a negative light. As such, the accuracy of the account may be questionable. Also noteworthy is the fact that the parents called Edwards to examine their disobedient child. Perhaps this reveals that Edwards was known to be effective with children. It also may signify that the parents themselves saw spiritual significance in the boy’s actions, and thus needed pastoral evaluation. 83 Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, originally published 1743, reprint (New York: Regina Press, 1975), 169.

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that parents held over their children, his advocacy for childhood conversion held within it dangerous implications. The special autonomy given to children by Edwards and others perhaps contributed to the growing rebellious nature of youth, and lack of respect for authority.

9.5

Conclusion

Edwards’s use of Enlightenment principles regarding childhood remained moderate. Remarkably, his combination of Calvinist doctrine with Enlightenment thinking prevented Edwards from reaching the more abusive excesses that both ideologies often exhibited.84 Certainly, it is possible to exaggerate Edwards’s use of Enlightenment principles regarding children. After all, Edwards saw himself as a defender of traditional Calvinist theology until the day he died. However, the examples of men like Oliver Wendell Holmes reveal that it is also too easy to discount the Enlightenment influence on Edwards. Edwards’s teachings were not as close to “Ancient barbarism” as Holmes and others made them out to be. Even most modern scholars fail to note the Enlightenment’s impact on Edwards’s childhood thought. What cannot be overemphasized with Edwards, however, is his complexity. Edwards was a transitional figure who came to prominence in a transitional period. He was greatly influenced by the Enlightenment, but it did not shatter his traditional views. To Edwards, children could be sinners miserably far from grace, but also examples of innocence and beauty. Childhood had a special role in God’s grand design, and Edwards used whatever resources he could – even Enlightened ones – to understand it.

84 Edwards biographer Perry Miller came to similar conclusions regarding the tension between Edwards’s philosophy and theology. He suggests that Edwards, due to his neo-platonic tendencies, possibly would have slipped into mysticism and pantheism without holding strictly to the confines of Calvinist theology. See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1956), 195.

Experience

Emily Dolan Gierer (University of Connecticut)*

Hannah Edwards Wetmore and Her Joyful Death The Deathbed Confessional During the Enlightenment

10.1 Introduction Reflecting on her recent brush with death, twenty-three-year-old Hannah Edwards Wetmore (1713–1773) wrote in her journal, “I came back into this restless world again (from which I had seemed to be set at so great a distance [)] with a constant regret. […] I begrutch myself my past privilege of being so free from the world and confusions of it.”1 The ninth child of Rev. Timothy and Esther Stoddard Edwards and the younger sister of Jonathan Edwards, Hannah periodically recorded her philosophical, theological, and personal reflections in writing. “Diary” is perhaps too formal a word for this loose collection of private writings written at sporadic intervals between 1736 and 1773, but these unpublished musings provide a fascinating window into both the eighteenth-century female experience and the unique experience of growing up an Edwards. Exceptionally well educated for an eighteenth-century woman and raised in a home where theological debate was breakfast conversation, Hannah wrote with a grace and clarity of thought that makes her work distinct among the scant examples of women’s writing from the pre-Revolutionary era.2 One of the longest sustained sections of Hannah’s journal focuses on the diphtheria epidemic (or “throat distemper” as she calls it) that swept across New * The author gives special thanks to Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema for providing her with a copy of his transcription of Hannah Edwards Wetmore’s private writings and diary fragment, held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. 1 Hannah Edwards Wetmore and Jonathan Edwards. Diary Fragment. Beinecke Library, Yale University. 2 Douglas L. Winiarski notes the scarcity of British North American women’s journals in the seventeenth and early eighteen centuries, citing Mehetabel Chandler Coit’s (begun in 1688), Sarah Kemble Knight’s (begun in 1704), and Lydia Prout’s (begun in 1716) as the earliest and only extant examples. Douglas L. Winiarski, “Lydia Prout’s Dreadfullest Thought,” The New England Quarterly 88.3 (September 2015): 358.

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England in 1735–6.3 In her description of the disease’s relentless attack on family and friends, including its fatal blow to her younger sister Lucy, Hannah also scrupulously describes her own near-death experience with the disease.4 While her account echoes many of the “joyful death” tropes made popular by Puritan theologians in their funeral sermons and didactic writings, Hannah’s strong sense of her own mind and her own experience brings a distinctively feminine voice to a moment typically dominated by male perspectives and ministerial agendas. Without any masculine or clerical interlopers to interpret her neardeath experience for her, her account offers rare unmediated insight into a large demographic in the early eighteenth century that was also largely overlooked: dying women. Alternating between her fears about her ultimate salvation and her longing “to be so free from the world and confusions of it,” Hannah’s account captures a fascinating, transitional moment as Puritan anxieties about assurance gave way to the Enlightenment’s more sentimentalized view of death, all seen through the lens of a highly educated, analytical, and theological female mind. By examining Hannah’s joy-less return to life alongside Cotton Mather’s very Puritan account of the joyful death of his sister Jerusha Oliver, this chapter will illustrate the way Puritan perspectives on death were becoming inadequate in an eighteenth-century Enlightenment context, as women like Hannah struggled between the hardships of life and the fearsome promise of death.

10.2 Death and Dying in New England The Puritan understanding of death is both one of its unique hallmarks and also, arguably, one of the causes of its decline.5 The Puritan doctrine of assurance prevented a believer from ever being wholly sure of his or her salvation until the moment of death, at which point there was little or no hope for salvation, as 3 For a detailed account of this epidemic and its impact on Colonial New England, see Ernest Caulfield “A History of the Epidemic, Vulgarly Called the Throat Distemper, As It Occurred in His Majesty’s New England Colonies Between 1735 and 1740,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 11, no. 3 (1939): 219–272, and Nicholas Bonneau, Unspeakable Loss: New England’s Invisible Throat Distemper Epidemics, 1735–1765 (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2017). 4 Lucy Edwards, the youngest of the Edwards’ ten children, died on August 21, 1736 at the age of twenty-one. 5 For more on Puritan understandings of death as well as their distinct practices around death, see David. E. Stannard’s “Death and Dying in Puritan New England,” American Historical Review 78.5 (1973): 1305–1330, Emory Elliot’s “The Development of the Puritan Funeral Sermon and Elegy: 1660–1750,” Early American Literature 15.2 (1980): 151–164 and Etta Madden’s, “Resurrecting Life Through Historical Ritual: A Buried Value of The Puritan Funeral Sermon,” Early American Literature 26.3 (1991): 232–250.

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Puritans did not believe in the death-bed sacraments practiced by the Catholics.6 Thus, the Puritan life was one of anxious self-examination for evidence of election and signs of regeneration, which could never be unequivocally confirmed until the moment after death, when one’s eyes opened to see the glories of heaven or the horrors of hell. In his seminal The Puritan Way of Death, David Stannard explores the seemingly irresolvable dissonance in the Puritan view of death as both terrible and desirable, a dissonance that he believes contributed to the unraveling of Puritan theology in the eighteenth century. As he explains, “doubt of salvation was essential to salvation and that Puritan who, for so long as he breathed, became at any time secure and comfortable in the knowledge of his salvation, was surely lost.”7 Stannard argues that such a position was ultimately emotionally, intellectually, and theologically untenable, as he highlights the cultural dissonance between a Christian faith that promised the hope of new life after death and a deterministic worldview that denied this hope to most.8 As the third and fourth generations of Puritan colonists became more open to European ideas and perspectives, including the works of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, the desire for more rational, scientific understandings of death began to challenge traditional Puritan beliefs.9 According to Desirée Henderson, “the eighteenth century witnessed an evolution of mourning rites and rituals, as the austere practices of the Puritan era were superseded by more elaborate and ornate ones that would eventually culminate in the sentimental cult of death in the nineteenth century.”10 Thus, death in the eighteenth century was a source of significant theological and practical debate, as intellectuals, clergy members, and ordinary people struggled to understand and explain its spiritual, physical, and social implications. Because the deathbed was such a contentious and anxiety-filled moment, Puritan ministers were fascinated by a dying person’s final thoughts and reflections, scrupulously recording and publishing them for public edification. In 6 For more on the Puritan doctrine of assurance, see Norman Pettit’s The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) and Edmund S. Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963): 67–73. 7 David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 83. 8 Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, 91–95. 9 In The New England Soul, Harry S. Stout provides a useful overview of the anglicization process of the third generation of Puritan ministers. See especially his chapter 7: “Anglicization.” Harry S. Stout, Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 131–152. 10 Desirée Henderson, “The Imperfect Dead: Mourning Women in Eighteenth-Century Oratory and Fiction,” Early American Literature 39.3 (2004): 491.

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England, Puritan minister James Janeway had published A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children in Two Parts (1671) to such wide success and acclaim that New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather imported it to the colonies and revised it as A Token, for the Children of New-England, Or, Some Examples of children, In whom the Fear of God was Remarkably Budding, before they Dyed, In Several Parts of New England (1700).11 Citing its roots in both Puritan theology and Lockean empiricism, Sarah Rivett refers to the practice of recording these deathbed moments as “tokenography” and argues that these deathbed “tokens” served as a rare opportunity to rationally prove the power of God and the reality of heaven and hell to the dying, the minister, and the reader using direct evidence from the experience of the dying. As Rivett argues: [T]he death bed scene became a crucial empirical site for mapping such evidence because the imminence of death permitted a ‘certain sign of regeneration.’ This theological concept offered a rare form of epistemological security that appealed to natural philosophers’ as well as ministers’ search for proof of God’s existence within the natural world.12

By recording a person’s final moments of life and the passage into death, ministers hoped to prove that signs of regeneration were a real, observable phenomenon that could be given as scientific proof of both God and His election. Yet, what these tokens give evidence of is not so much God’s work in the natural world, but the changing theological perspectives of God’s people. The majority of these accounts were written by male clergy with a particular theological lesson to emphasize or underscore. For obvious reasons, few of the dying wrote their own accounts or were able to specify which aspect of their journey to the grave was most important to emphasize. This is again why Hannah Edwards Wetmore’s account is so invaluable to contemporary scholars, for her account of her own near-death experience shows not a desire to prove God’s existence, or even an extended struggle over her own assurance, but rather a careful mind trying to distinguish between divine encounter and fever-addled delusion. Her account testifies to anxiety about her ultimate end but also describes a sense of peace and rest which she had rarely experienced on this side of the grave. 11 For more on Cotton Mather’s and James Janeway’s writings for children, see Courtney Weikle-Mills’ Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), especially her first chapter “Youth as a Time of Choice: Children’s Reading in Colonial New England,” 32–62. See also Howard A. Mayer’s “Puritan Triumph: The Joyful Death Books of Cotton Mather and James Janeway” Triumphs of the Spirit in Children’s Literature, ed. Francella Butler and Richard Rotert (Hamden: Lib. Professional Pub, 1986): 209–220. 12 Sarah Rivett, “Tokenography: Narration and the Science of Dying in Puritan Deathbed Testimonies,” Early American Literature 42, no. 3 (2007): 472.

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Through Hannah’s words, we see the evidence of Enlightenment rationality as her attention is more focused on determining the truth and authenticity of her near-death experiences than on the struggle against fears of hell and damnation that marked the writings of seventeenth-century male clergymen.

10.3 Cotton Mather and the Puritan “Joyful Death” In a 1719 inventory of his books and papers, Timothy Edwards, the patriarch of the sizable Edwards family, recorded almost seventy books and pamphlets stored in his personal trunk. Numerous works by the great Puritan pastors and theologians Increase and Cotton Mather filled the list, but one Mather text in particular stands out: Cotton Mather’s Memorials of Early Piety. Occurring in the Holy Life & Joyful Death of Mrs. Jerusha Oliver (1711).13 Mather’s text, comprised of selected excerpts from the journals of his youngest sister and her testimony from her deathbed following the birth of her first child, was published with the explicit intention “To Do Good in the world” particularly among “Younger Persons of the Female Sex; whose improvement in Piety would not be too much Studied, if there were much more Study Employ’d than there is upon it.”14 As Edwards liked to joke that between his ten daughters (Esther, Elizabeth, Anne, Mary, Eunice, Abigail, Jerusha, Hannah, Lucy, and Martha) he had “sixty-feet of daughters,” it is little wonder he had a slim volume on personal piety for young women among his books.15 Although several other memorial texts by Mather and funeral sermons by other Puritan ministers are included in Edwards’ list, this account of Jerusha’s “Holy Life & Joyful Death” is notably targeted at a younger and specifically female audience, and thus has a unique role in religious, literary, and cultural history. Mather’s account is intended to provide a prototypical female experience of death through the model of his sister and to teach generations of other young women how to live their lives in a way that would ultimately result in the “joyful death” of being with Christ in Heaven. While this was the intention Mather stated in his preface, the Edwards family provides an important test case to how young women actually responded to Mather’s account and the cultural tropes of the deathbed confessional that developed around it. Before we can explore the distinctives of Hannah’s account and the way it reflects the changing theology of death in the eighteenth century, we must first have a better understanding of the standard model Cotton Mather describes in 13 WJEO 26:259. 14 Cotton Mather. Memorials of Early Piety. Occurring in the Holy Life & Joyful Death of Mrs. Jerusha Oliver (T. Green: Boston, 1711), Early American Imprints I: Evans, “Preface.” 15 George M. Marsden, Johnathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 18.

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Memorial of Early Piety, one of the first accounts of the Puritan female deathbed confessional. As the text depicts his own sister, Mather attempts to avoid accusations of brotherly bias by insisting in the opening pages that he “forbears every thing that looks like Flourish and Applause upon her Character, and gives but a bare Transcript, and Extract of those Memoirs, which her own Pen had provided.”16 The forty-five pages that follow are made up of long excerpts from Jerusha’s diary: her catalogue of her sins, a covenant she made between God and her own soul at the age of twelve, her notes from sermons, her prayer requests, and her fears on death. In one of the entries Mather includes, written just months before Jerusha died from complications following the birth of her daughter, she describes her fear of death as she faced the often-fatal realities of colonial childbirth. I am of a very fearful disposition naturally, and am much afraid of Death, and therefore afraid what will be the issue of my being with Child; but I desire to commit my whole self, Soul and Body, and all the concerns thereof unto my God, and my Lord Jesus Christ; and particularly that affair of my Travail and Lying-in. My God has prevented my fears sometimes. I desire to trust in him that He will do so concerning this also. (28)

What seems to be a rare moment of vulnerability actually serves to further establish Jerusha as the ideal Puritan woman who lived with constant anxiety about her ultimate salvation yet desired to trust in God nevertheless, believing that He could and would calm her fears. Despite Mather’s insistence that the text for the memorial came almost entirely from Jerusha’s pen, the final pages describing her death scene are all from Mather’s perspective. Although the birth of her infant daughter went more smoothly than expected, the following week Jerusha’s health unexpectedly declined and she was soon teetering on the edge of death. Yet in these finals hours of her life, Mather describes how the fear of death that had oppressed her for her entire life was suddenly lifted. As he writes, “But now, to our Astonishment, she told those who attended her: She was sure the Time for her Death was now come; And she was now above the Fear of it, that she had heretofore been Subject to.”17 Not only is Jerusha no longer subject to her lifelong fear, but according to Mather’s account, she is now overwhelmed with joy and bursts into song. Confirming that nothing about her “Look’d at all Delirious,” Mather describes her “Ecstasy of Joy,” in which she sang: “O the Glory of Heaven! O the Glory of Heaven! O the Glory of Heaven! I see a Glory, which cannot be Express’d; Persons and Things, which I want a language to declare what they are!”18 Mather takes her “rapturous enthusiasms” as the “plain Signatures of an Angelical Operation,” 16 Mather, Memorials of Early Piety, 2. 17 Mather, Memorials of Early Piety, 48. 18 Mather, Memorials of Early Piety, 50.

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especially “when they are in Persons never known to be in the least subject to Enthusiasm, or to any things of a Rapturous Nature, but much the contrary, as it as with our Jerusha.”19 The Mather family was notoriously skeptical of angelic visitations to women, as women were considered to be more prone to demonic delusions and attacks from Satan.20 Yet in his own sister’s final hours, Cotton Mather seems entirely willing to put his doubts and skepticism aside in favor of seeing Jerusha’s sudden joy as evidence of her election. Again, as Mather is only interpreting what he believes he is seeing, there is no way of knowing what Jerusha was actually experiencing and how she would have characterized this “ecstasy of joy.” What seemed to be the “plain signature of angelic operations” to Mather might have been something quite different to Jerusha, but Mather gets the last word. Following her joyous exclamations, Mather describes Jerusha as lingering quietly but impatiently on earth for a few more days, until finally dying with the words “I am in Distress to be gone!” on her lips. He concludes his account by summarizing the amazing transformation she experienced in her final days as she was completely delivered from her lifelong fear of death. As he writes, “She was for many years much afraid of Dying; and particularly fearful, that the Pangs of Death would prove terrible and very grevious and painful. It pleased God, that the Event proved much otherwise than she feared. She dyed Easily; and fill’d with Divine and Holy Joy.”21 This transformation not only proves Jerusha’s status as a true believer and member of the elect but also establishes her as a model for other Puritan women. Though she was plagued with a fear of death since childhood, Jerusha had lived a pious, faithful, and deeply self-reflective life. At death she passed easily into heaven, giving clear and observable evidence of her election, the power of God, and the joy of heaven. Though using a woman’s experience as evidence that God existed and allowing her to at least partially tell her own story of her own life, Mather’s Memorials of Early Piety is still a very masculine and ministerial depiction of the deathbed confessional and helped to perpetuate a genre of fairly standard seventeenthcentury depiction of joyful deaths and the female religious experience. Mather maintains that the memoir is nothing more than a combination of Jerusha’s own words and his transcription of what he witnessed, but he ignores the fact that he 19 Mather, Memorials of Early Piety, 51–2. 20 For more on both Increase and Cotton Mather’s doubts about angelic visitations, see Elizabeth Reis’s “Immortal Messengers: Angels, Gender, and Power in Early America,” Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, ed. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 167–8. For more on Puritan minister’s general skepticism of women’s accounts of angelic and divine visitations, see Reis’s Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997): 93–120. 21 Mather, Memorials of Early Piety, 53.

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had all the authorial control in how Jerusha’s words were presented and how the final moments of her death were framed, interpreted, and remembered. With no access to Jerusha’s own feelings, experiences, and consciousness on her death bed, it is impossible to discern how much of Mather’s account is a teaching tool and how much of it accurately reflects Jerusha’s final hours.

10.4 Death through the Eyes and Pen of Hannah Edwards Wetmore Whether or not Hannah Edwards Wetmore ever read Memorials of Early Piety is unknowable, although its presence in her father’s trunk during her girlhood, her father’s deep respect for the Mather family, the text’s specific intention of educating young women, and her family’s heavy emphasis on female moral education would all suggest that she was at least familiar with the text even if she never read it herself. This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that her account of her own near-death experience resembles Jerusha Oliver’s in several significant ways, particularly in her fear of death and her ecstatic experience. Yet by contrast, Hannah tells her experience unmediated by either the male perspective or the need to make her life a teaching text, as her private writing was not intended for publication or public edification.22 Giving rare insight into the eighteenth-century female experience of death, Hannah paints a picture of herself as a young woman plagued by unhappiness in life who seemingly struggles less with a fear of death than with a longing for it. Though she describes some experiences of fear quite similar to Jerusha’s, her most significant fears are that her divine encounters might simply be feverish delusions, signaling in many ways the rational search for empirical truth that would become the hallmark of the Enlightenment era. Though her account is rich with self-examination and struggle, she keeps much of her ecstatic experiences to herself. Thus, any clergymen in the room would have had disappointingly little to record, highlighting yet again the invaluable importance of such a first-hand narrative. Hannah’s account of her illness begins by depicting the virulence of the diphtheria epidemic that spread throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1736. As she describes, “In the spring it reached Wethersfield, Hartford and several towns near us, and appeared at its first coming in a terrible shape. The next summer and autumn following, it overspread this part of the country: scarce any town escaped, at some towns proving very mortal and terrible, and at others 22 Although it was never published, Hannah’s daughter Lucy Wetmore did edit her mother’s journal, recopying several sections and noting places where her mother had edited the original manuscript, suggesting either mother or daughter may have considered the possibility of publishing at least sections of the manuscript at some point.

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very gentle.”23 Jerusha Edwards, the sister born just before Hannah and considered the “moral regulator” among the siblings,24 had already died from the same disease just seven years before, and this second outbreak in 1736 left hardly anyone in the extended Edwards family unscathed. Her elder sister Anne’s husband John Ellsworth and their child were among the first to fall ill, followed by Hannah’s sister Eunice Edwards Backus, who subsequently lost her newborn infant. Hannah’s older, unmarried sister Mary went to nurse Eunice but soon became sick herself, as did Eunice’s eldest daughter. Jonathan Edwards’s wife Sarah was also severely struck by the disease, as was the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, the husband of the eldest Edwards daughter, Esther. Hannah was visiting with the Hopkins family in Springfield, Massachusetts when the epidemic began in May, and she saw Rev. Hopkins, his eldest daughter, and three other members of the Hopkins household suffer the throat distemper. While Hannah was still in Springfield helping nurse the Hopkins family, her younger sister Lucy became sick and died at the Edwards family home in East Windsor, Connecticut on August 21st, 1736. Hannah was not able to return home until after Lucy was already buried, yet the specter of death still lingered at the Edwards’s door, as her sisters Abigail, Elizabeth, and Hannah herself all became seriously ill. In total, ten of the eleven Edwards children either became sick themselves or had a spouse or child affected by the throat distemper; only Martha, the youngest of all the Edwards children, seems to have escaped the epidemic untouched. Because of the pall of illness and death that hung about the household, Hannah recalls how their neighbors scrupulously avoided them, “almost as shy as if it had been the small pox.”25 With regards to her own experience with the disease, she begins her account rather morbidly (and perhaps a bit jealously) by describing her visit to the fresh grave of her twenty-one-year-old sister Lucy, observing it was “at Jerusha’s left hand, a place I had often laid out for myself.”26 The following morning, she awoke feeling unwell and “by noon was convinced it was with the same distemper; and began to take care, to put things in such order, as it would be best to leave them.”27 Although facing death, Hannah seems to have had less anxiety about her salvation than might be expected from the daughter of such a deeply religious family. 23 Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. 24 Kenneth P. Minkema, “Hannah and Her Sisters: Sisterhood, Courtship, and Marriage in the Edwards Family in the Early Eighteenth Century” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 146 (1992): 43. See also Minkema, “Writing the Dead: Death & Memory in the Edwards Family in the 18th Century,” “New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies Lecture Series, Jonathan Edwards Center at TEDS, Mar. 3, 2016. 25 Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. 26 Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. 27 Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment.

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Unlike Jerusha Oliver’s account from twenty-five years previous, Hannah does not seem to have been plagued by fear of hell or religious doubts to the same extreme extent, though she does acknowledge concern about her eternal fate. Growing worse as the day continued, Hannah recalls feeling “a calmness I cannot account for, which did not seem [to] arise from a satisfaction that my soul was safe, nor altogether from senselessness and stupidity. […] I seem[ed] to be set at great distance from this world, and to have no concern with it.”28 Although she does not feel fully secure in her salvation, Hannah’s greatest struggle is not a spiritual one but an intellectual one—she is constantly trying to discern between her genuine experiences and fever-induced delusions. On the second day of her illness, as her symptoms seemed to worsen, Hannah describes her weakening grasp on reality by noting, “as my distemper prevailed upon me, I was apt to be lost, and found it difficult to free my thoughts; and I soon grew delirious at turns.”29 In the midst of her delirium, the possibility of her impending death impresses itself upon her, and she writes, “When I thought of the danger I [was] in, it was not without a deep concern, for fear I was not prepared for death, and did set myself to seek for mercy as well as I could, though very unfitted for it: but always hoped to get well, and when I thought of dying, I had some hopes of going to rest, though I feared.”30 Acknowledging her fears of death and doubts of salvation, Hannah also seems buoyed by hope that she will either survive or be accepted into heaven. Her fears of death still seem secondary to her fears of spiritual delusions, for she spends more time documenting her mental state than her spiritual state. On the following evening, Hannah writes, “I was much out of my head; and though I was rational a great deal of my time after that, yet my mind was full of strange ideas.”31 With medical precision, Hannah attempts to keep record of when she was and wasn’t “out of my head,” perhaps so she could later analyze her experience and better understand some of the “strange ideas” that plagued her. Some of these strange ideas may have included atypical ecstatic experiences and music that she is not entirely sure she is actually hearing. Mather confidently described the “signatures of an angelic operation” in Jerusha Oliver’s final days, but without a third-party observer to discern her state of mind and legitimize her supernatural experiences, Hannah struggles to determine for herself whether she is experiencing holy encounters or the delusions of a feverish brain. Rather than having her spiritual experiences explained to her by someone else, Hannah carefully weighs the validity of experiences that might be characterized as “sig28 29 30 31

Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment.

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natures of an angelic operation” by using her own powers of reason and theological understanding. Describing her worsening fever and subsequent experience of divine music, Hannah writes: By Thursday night, I grew very bad, my fever raged exceedingly, and after that my spirits were (as the doctor said) much raised by my distemper; and I thought myself better. And about that time I began to hear the sound, or rather to have strong and exceeding lively ideas, of music; the finest, most exalted and solemn by far, that I had ever any conception of before. My ideas were of its being the voices of a vast number of beings in the air. It solemnized my mind and carried my ideas much into the other world. I used to be very much ravished with it, and sometimes felt lost or in a sort of trance: had scarce any distinct ideas, hardly knew who or what I was, but felt like a wave in the air, held there by the music…32

For several days, Hannah experiences this supernatural music only when she is silent and no one else is talking to her. When others are with her, she hesitates to describe to them what she is experiencing “lest that should abate the pleasure I took in it, or occasion the ideas to leave me.” Five days into her illness, when she is “in some degree out of her head,” she talks about the music to those caring for her and the music subsequently stops. Though the music, which included “the ringing and tolling of bells” and “the merriest notes of a violin” brought her comfort and pleasure in the midst of the worst days of her illness, she ultimately concludes it was a figment of her imagination. As she writes, “though I was something delirious and sometimes lost, yet I was to a considerable degree rational, and consulted with myself about it, and concluded it was my imagination only.”33 Though Jerusha Oliver had a similarly musical encounter which Mather confidently identified the “plain signature of angelic operations,” Hannah’s account differs sharply as she dismisses this heavenly music as little more than the product of her feverish imagination. Though Hannah’s own memory of events was surely informed and influenced by those who cared for her, her account brings a distinct and highly rational perspective to the supernatural experiences around death that would otherwise be unknowable. Not satisfied to simply experience these strange encounters unquestioned, she goes through a careful, almost scientific examination of herself to determine the state of her mind. Even on the brink of death, she values intellectual rigor and trusts the power of logic. The great care she exerts to determine whether she is having a divine encounter or suffering from the delusions of her fever is also uniquely Edwardsean. A decade later, in 1746, Jonathan Edwards himself reflected upon the impressions 32 Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. 33 Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment.

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that might plague persons “such as are of a weak and vapory habit of body, and the brain weak, and easily susceptive of impressions” in his A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, a text specifically written to address the differences between genuine religious experiences and false ones.34 He concludes that such people “may have strange apprehensions and imaginations, and strong affections attending them, unaccountably arising, which are not voluntarily produced by themselves” in which “neither a good nor evil spirit have any immediate hand.”35 Thus, Edwards seems to come to a similar conclusion about such divine encounters that his sister did in her sickbed: rather than being either angelic or demonic, they are simply the product of a feverish mind and imagination. Although Puritan ministers of Mather’s era were generally skeptical of divine and/ or angelic interactions, during and after the Great Awakening angelic sightings and supernatural experiences at one’s death bed were more commonly described and accepted as signs of hope and assurance.36 According to Elizabeth Reis, “As Christians became more comfortable in their hope of heaven, angels increasingly (even up to the present) confirmed ordinary people’s intimate and favorable relationship with the divine, while making salvation more tangible.”37 Thus, Hannah’s skepticism of her own experience stands in contrast to more general acceptance of heavenly visitations in the 1730s and 40s. Such a skepticism underscores the atypical nature of Hannah’s account, her rigorous self-examination, and her refusal to take any part of her experience at simple face value. After battling so much with her own mind, Hannah’s less-than-enthusiastic response about surviving her illness (“I came back into this restless world […] with a constant regret”) is not entirely theological nor is it particularly surprising, considering the unfortunate romantic drama that marred her reputation and had driven her from East Windsor to stay with the Hopkins family in the first place. In 1732 Matthew Rockwell, a local physician who had boarded with the Edwards family off and on since 1729, had turned his affections from the recently departed 34 WJEO 2:142. For further discussion of Edwards’ Religious Affections, see Ava Chamberlin’s “Self-Deception as a Theological Problem in Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Treatise concerning Religious Affections’” Church History 63.4 (1994): 541–556 and William Breitenbach’s “Religious Affections and Religious Affectations: Antinomianism in the Writings of Edwards and Franklin” in Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture, eds. Barbara B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 13–26. 35 WJEO 2:142. 36 Reis notes that after the wide-spread religious revivals of the 1730s and 40s, “angel sightings had become a more common feature in believers’ writings. Angels appeared to encourage people with regard to their prospects after death.” Reis, “Immortal Messengers,” 164. For more on the Puritan skepticism of angelic visitations and the ways this skepticism shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Robert Bruce Mullin’s Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 37 Reis, “Immortal Messengers,” 164.

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Jerusha Edwards to the next sister in line: Hannah. When he asked Timothy and Esther Edwards for Hannah’s hand in marriage, they offered no clear response and left it to Hannah and Matthew to determine for themselves. Whether due to a miscommunication with her parents or with Hannah herself, Matthew seems to have mistakenly assumed they were engaged and began building a costly new home for his bride-to-be. Hannah was apparently much less excited about the proposed match and delayed the wedding for several years, until in late 1735 she managed to force Matthew into releasing her from the engagement, which at the time was considered legally binding. However, in 1736 Matthew reneged upon his release and renewed his insistence upon the marriage with increasingly public displays and protestations. Hannah fled from Matthew and the criticisms of her neighbors to stay with her sister Esther Edwards Hopkins in Springfield, writing home to her parents that she had been “severely sensured and Lookd upon at Windsor as very vile with Respect to my concerns with Mr R.”38 The drama with Matthew Rockwell would intensify throughout the subsequent years, as Matthew brought it before the local congregation and Hannah was threatened with a formal church trial, until he finally released her from the engagement by marrying Jemima Cook in 1743.39 In light of this personal drama that threatened her future and her entire family’s reputation, Hannah seems to mourn the fact that she survived her illness perhaps not because she longed to be united with her Savior in heaven but because she dreaded returning to the conflicts on earth. As she writes: I came back into this restless world again (from which I had seemed to be set at so great a distance[)] with a constant regret. I shrunk at the thought of being exposed to snares and temptations, and having my mind filled with trifling but vexatious cares of it. I had almost ever since I had been sick (notwithstanding my great affliction and the distressing circumstances of the family) enjoyed a calmness and quiet, and indeed a sweetness and exaltation of mind, which I was very loath to lose…40

Thus, Hannah ends her lengthy account of her illness and near-death experience with this rather unexpected observation: “There is no part of my life I regret the passing of so much, nor that I reflect upon with so much pleasure.”41 This closing comment about her near-death experience as one of the most pleasant of her life may explain why the description of it is the longest and most detailed account among her private writings. Even though the section may have no larger didactic purpose, she carefully crafted the narrative of the events and her responses with more attention, more detail, and more self-reflection in order to enshrine a 38 39 40 41

Quited in Minkema, “Hannah and Her Sisters,” 52. Minkema, “Hannah and Her Sisters,” 48–53. Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment. Wetmore and Edwards, Diary Fragment.

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season of her life that gave her pleasure to reflect on, assurance about her future salvation, and proof of her exceptionally analytical mind.

10.5 Conclusion As we saw with Jerusha Oliver’s story, one of the earliest prototypes of the American female deathbed confessional, the deathbed scene is a powerful moment of personal comfort, religious assurance, and life instruction, although different meanings could be written onto it depending on who held the pen. As women rarely described their own death experiences, they did not have the opportunity to create meaning out of their experience in the way Hannah Edwards Wetmore did. Thus, deathbed narratives became tools for male clergymen to enforce conventional morality, as the subjects could no longer speak for themselves nor defend their own experiences. Yet, in Hannah’s account we see a very individualized account of a young woman’s near-death experience that contains no discernable didactic aspirations nor male interventions. Rather than being a deeply reflective examination of her salvation, Hannah’s account focuses more regularly and consistently on tracking the soundness of her mind amidst the ravages of fever. This rare, first-hand account of illness, visions, and religious anxiety provides invaluable insight into changing perspectives on death as Puritanism waned in the eighteenth century. Against the emerging backdrop of the Great Awakening, fear of delusion seems to surpass fear of death as Hannah meticulously records her thoughts, feelings, and impressions, leaving nothing open to male interpretation. [Hannah Edwards Wetmore, Account of Sickness, 1736]42 The year 1736 was filled up with remarkable passages of providence towards the country in general, but more especially towards our family. Sometime the year before, we heard of the throat distemper’s proving so very mortal at the eastward, and in the winter ’36, we frequently heard of its proceeding and raging exceedingly: which made our hearts to bleed for those so visited, and to tremble, fearing what the ensuing year would bring upon us. We were in expectation of, and did as it were, wait for the judgments of God, which seemed in some measure to solemnize the minds of people. It continued to come nearer and nearer, but as it approached it lost some of its terror, growing more mild and less mortal. In the 42 “Account of Sickness” is excerpted from Hannah’s much longer diary, which has been transcribed by Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema. All subsequent notes are Minkema’s, and I am deeply grateful to him for sharing his transcription and notes with me. The manuscripts of Hannah Wetmore Edwards are in the Edwards Family Collection at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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spring it reached Wethersfield, Hartford and several towns near us, and appeared at its first coming in a terrible shape. The next summer and autumn following, it overspread this part of the country: scarce any town escaped, at some towns proving very mortal and terrible, and at others very gentle; and to families in the same town, to some very terrible and the effects awful, and to others but light. As for our family and myself in particular: I being under melancholy and difficult circumstances at home on some accounts43…it occasioned me [to] spend great part of my time that spring and summer at Springfield. I went first at the beginning of April and returned the beginning of May, and found my brother Ellsworth44 dangerously sick, and in a few days his child was also taken very ill. In about a week’s time I was obliged to return to Springfield again, left my brother and his child both in a doubtful state, though with hopes the worst was past with them. I went from home from prudential considerations, but ‘twas with many relentings, and with a heavy heart I left my friends. I had not been gone long before I heard of my mother’s45 being laid up and suffering much pain with the rheumatism, which made me very uneasy and more long to go home; but was, as I thought, providentially forbid. I was soon after seized with the throat distemper, but it proved but a light visitation, and soon past of[f]. And after some time I heard of the amendment of my mother, my Brother E[llswort]h and his child, but was presently made sorrowful by learning my sister Backus46 was dangerously sick of the throat distemper and had lost her infant child. And the messenger had scarce done speaking, as it were, before we heard again that sister Molly,47 who went to be helpful to sister B[ackus], was there taken with the same distemper, and it was hard upon her, and sister’s oldest daughter had it exceeding bad at the same time, and that poor family was in a distressed condition for some time. In the meantime, my brother Edwards’s wife48 feel into great and, as they feared, a dangerous weakness. Of some of these sorrowful things my sister Lucy49 informed me of in a letter, and also that she was much overdone to that degree that she had a settled weakness and pain in her breast. It was very unnatural to me be absent from home at such a time; my soul did long after my father’s house. But I felt as if I was banished, for

43 A reference to her ongoing efforts to extricate herself from a marriage contract with Matthew Rockwell of East Windsor. The scandal made it necessary for her to leave for Springfield, where she stayed with her sister, Esther Edwards Hopkins. 44 Anne Edwards (b. April 28, 1699) m. John Ellsworth of East Windsor, Connecticut in 1734. 45 Esther Stoddard Edwards (1680–1771), who had m. Timothy Edwards (1669–1758) in 1694. 46 Eunice Edwards (b. Aug. 20, 1705) had m. Rev. Simon Backus of Newington, Connecticut in 1729. 47 Mary Edwards (b. Feb. 11, 1701). 48 Sarah Pierpont Edwards, who m. Jonathan Edwards on July 28, 1727. 49 Lucy Edwards was b. May 25, 1715.

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some circumstance relating to [Mr. Rockwell]50 forbid my going home, but took care to ease my sister of the burthen of business that lay upon her; and I soon heard she had recovered her health, and the rest of friends were better. But in the meantime, Mr. Hopkins51 and his eldest daughter were taken with a very bad fever and ague, which held them till I heard of sister Lucy’s sickness three days before her death. And just about that time, Mr. Hopkins’s family were taken with the throat distemper, and five of them had it, and some of ‘em considerably bad; and at the time of sister Lucy’s sickness and after, our family was in the most distressed condition, worn out with grief and terror, and with a great burden which lay upon them for want of help, my mother and sister Molly not being fully recovered from their own sickness; the neighbors being frighted and almost as shy as if it had been the small pox. My sister died August 21st. on Saturday morning, at which time my sister Nabby52 lay, as was feared, at the point of death with the same throat distemper. The next Tuesday morning I was seized with it, and in less than a week’s time was brought to death’s door; at which time, on Saturday night, sister Betty53 was violently seized with the same distemper, and my sister Nabby, though better of her distemper, in the utmost distress and horror in her mind, and in a manner harried out of her reason, which of itself would have been a sore affliction.54 [Lucy Wetmore interpolates: After her return from Springfield, she writes thus. She did return until after her sister was buried.] On Monday evening, went to Lucy’s grave and found it as Jerusha’s left hand, a place I had often laid out for myself. The next morning I awaked ill, and by noon was convinced it was the same distemper; and began to take care, to put things in such order, as it would be best to leave them. At night I grew very ill for the time, but was not under any amazement at all; but felt a calmness that I cannot account for, which did not seem [to] arise from a satisfaction that my soul was safe, nor altogether from senselessness and stupidity. But as my distemper prevailed upon me, I was apt to be lost, and found it difficult to free my thoughts; and I soon grew delirious at turns. But though my distemper was hard upon me, yet my courage kept up. My spirits seemed generally in a pleasing posture, and always hoped for the best. My mind was much solemnized; I seem[ed] to be set at great distance from this world, and to have no concern with it. It then appeared to me vain, toilsome place, and that the inhabitants were strangely wandered, lost and bewildered. And it seemed a comfort to me that I was so separated from the 50 There is a dash in the MS. 51 Rev. Samuel Hopkins of West Springfield, Massachusetts, who m. Esther Edwards in 1727. It was to their house that HE went in the spring and summer of 1736. 52 Abigail Edwards (b. Dec. 28, 1707). 53 Elizabeth Edwards (b. April 14, 1697). 54 LW’s copy resumes.

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confusion of worldly affairs by my present affliction and danger; my mind in general, though melancholy, was yet in a quiet frame. When I thought of the danger I [was] in, it was not without a deep concern, for fear I was not prepared for death, and did set myself to seek for mercy as well as I could, though very unfitted for it: but always hoped to get well, and when I thought of dying, I had some hopes of going to rest, though I feared. On Wednesday night I was much out of my head; and though I was rational a great deal of my time after that, yet my mind was full of strange ideas. By Thursday night, I grew very bad, my fever raged exceedingly, and after that my spirits were (as the doctor said) much raised by my distemper; and I thought myself better. And about that time I began to hear the sound, or rather to have strong and exceeding lively ideas, of music; the finest, most exalted and solemn by far, that I had ever any conception of before. My ideas were of its being the voices of a vast number of beings in the air. It solemnized my mind, and carried my ideas much into the other world. I used to be very much ravished with it, and sometimes felt lost or in a sort of trance: had scarce any distinct ideas, hardly knew who or what I was but, but felt like a wave in the air, held there by the music; and though I was something delirious and sometimes lost, yet I was to a considerable degree rational, and consulted with myself about it, and concluded it was in my imagination only. I [had] thoughts of speaking of it to those about me, but forbore, lest that should abate the pleasure I took in it, or occasion the ideas to leave. At times I endeavored to give a close attention to it, discern the notes more particularly, and then it would vanish from me. When anybody spoke to me, or when I was talking, I should lose the ideas; but when I lay still again, they would instantly return. This held a day or two, and then began to change to the ringing and tolling of bells, and at last, against my will, to the merriest notes of a violin, exceeding lively and distinct, and the finest of the sort I ever heard—but I strove against it. It seemed to raise my spirits in a different manner, and made me feel airy and light and if I could fly, which made me uneasy and afraid I should be so in reality. Then I was in some degree out of my head, which made me talk of it to those about, and then it left me. This, I think, was on Saturday night. [Lucy Wetmore interpolates: She writes some account of the state of her mind in her sickness as follows, though a considerable part is torn off.] My heart was moved to love and gratitude to my Redeemer and Great Benefactor, but my ideas at this time were somewhat confused, and I [was] unable to examine the acts of my own mind. But I help this confidence, or hope, some time: and when I was out of my head, and thought myself sick and lost, or at a river side, and among stranger[s] that would not direct me home. I longed to get home, that I might be in quiet and have leisure to exercise my thoughts and be trusting in and loving Jesus Christ; and thought that if [I] did die, I should be safe enough, if they would let me get home and be in the exercise of faith and dependence upon him.

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But all my notions of these things were somewhat confused. On Monday, I grew sensibly better; on Tuesday was got out of bed, which I had not been for six days before, and came steadily to reason, and begin to find myself capable of attention in my deviant and found more pleasure in religion than I had ever done before, and a great desire my life should become one continued act of devotion. And though I could not depend on my last supposed faith as true, yet it had left a grateful sense upon my mind. It was pleasant to me on many accounts to find myself growing better, especially because I was no in such present danger of death, and because I might not be so burdensome to my parents and sister Molly, who were almost worn out with grief and tending. Yet I came back into this restless world again (from which I had seemed to be set at so great a distance [)] with a constant regret. I shrunk at the thought of being exposed to snares and temptations, and having my mind filled with trifling but vexatious cares of it. I had almost ever since I had been sick (notwithstanding my great affliction and the distressing circumstances of the family) enjoyed a calmness and quiet, and indeed a sweetness and exaltation of mind, which I was very loath to lose; but as I grew well I found it necessary, and in some degree natural, to concern myself with the world. And the business and cares of it would sometimes engage, vex, and debase [my] mind, which I have ever since groaned under and said to myself, ‘tis better to be sick. There is no part of my life I regret the passing of so much, nor that I reflect upon with so much pleasure. I begrutch myself my past privilege of being so free from the world and confusions of it. But I must, and am in a great measure, got into them again. I find myself more and more engaged in the business, and affected with the accidents of this world, every week, if not every day, which against my will takes up my thoughts and fills my mind with anxiety. A sense of the reality, nearness and importance of things of another world daily abates.

Kamil Marcin Halambiec (The College of Theology and Social Sciences in Warsaw)

Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightened Fear of Enthusiasm

11.1 Introduction Though Jonathan Edwards’s historical stature and theological influence is monumental, much scholarly debate persists regarding Edwards’s status as an “enthusiast,” one who defended religious expression through bodily manifestation, or kinesthetic reactions such as convulsions, vocal utterances, and crying. Influenced both by his Puritan tradition and by the Enlightenment era in which he lived in, Edwards believed that mind and body correspond with each other and naturally influence each other, and thus he defended the necessity of both emotions and affections in the religious experience.1 For some scholars, like Paul K. Conkin, Edwards’s belief in the correspondence between body and mind indicates his defense of bodily manifestations.2 Scholars of this persuasion interpret Edwards as asserting that even thinking about the beauty of God or the terror of hell must influence the body, which will react in a certain kinesthetic manifestation. Others, such as William Schweitzer, disagreeing, going so far as to state that such conclusions cannot be taken seriously as scholarship on Edwards.3 There are many scholars that stand on both sides of this debate. As Ann Taves notes, during Edwards’s time, enthusiasm and reason were seen as opposing modes of religious expression: “The enlightened fear of enthusiasm was coupled with a desire for an end to religious disputes. . . in this quest for an end to the religious dispute, enthusiasm (along with superstition) held pride of

1 According to Edwards, “affections represent the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul.” See “Affections” in The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, ed. H.S. Stout, K.P. Minkema, A.C. Neele (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 8. 2 Paul K. Conkin, Puritans & Pragmatists, Eight Eminent American Thinkers (London: Indiana University Press, 1976), 59. 3 William Schweitzer, “Review of Kathryn Reklis, Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity,” 2014.

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place as the enemy of reason.”4 For critics, enthusiasm indicated “the delusion or imposture of those who falsely believe or profess that they are or have been possessed by the Spirit.”5 In short, critics of enthusiasm defined it as an erroneous, and irrational, belief in the union with the divine.6 Thus, somebody who was regarded as an enthusiast would be at the same time considered anti-intellectual. Part of the characteristics of enthusiasm were dreams, visions, and involuntary bodily movements. Such manifestations were common during Great Awakening and the ministry of Edwards, as well as that of Whitefield and Wesley during an evangelical revival in Great Britain. These occurrences opened the way for critics of revival to regard Edwards as an anti-intellectual enthusiast. What was Edwards’ opinion and thought about enthusiasm? Even if he had a balanced view about bodily manifestation—not promoting nor discouraging—was he anti-intellectual? What was unique in his thought that enabled him to be regarded as the great theologian and revivalist, and at the same time—from the secular perspective—a great philosopher and one of the greatest of American minds of the Enlightened era?”7 Was Edwards a proponent of bodily manifestations? And why are there different interpretations of his understanding about this topic? To answer these questions, I will first explore the context of the Enlightenment that shaped Edwards’s writing and preaching, and examine the “enlightened fear of enthusiasm” during this period. Secondly, I will analyze Edwards’s understanding of religious experience through examination of some of his writings, particularly his sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, to understand Edwards’s perspective on bodily manifestations.8 I conclude that for Edwards, religion is not primarily an affair of the intellect, but an affair of the heart and that religious experience is not a product of reason or emotion, but it is an integrated experience of the love and beauty of God. Therefore, Edwards cannot be called an enthusiast, as he does not oppose the intellect, but on the other hand, he would not agree with anti-enthusiasts, who refused to appreciate the true nature of religious experience.

4 Ann Taves, Fits, Trances & Visions. Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 19. 5 J.G.A. Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment,” Huntington Library Quarterly no. 1/2 (1997): 10. 6 H.W. Wardman, “Enthusiasm: The Enlightenment, the Revolution and After,” European Studies Review, 6 (1976): 45. 7 Louis J. Mitchell, Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2003), iii; Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 649. 8 WJE 17:410.

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11.2 The Enlightenment Fear of Enthusiasm and the First Great Awakening Every epoch has its characteristic ideas, values, convictions, and beliefs, altogether often labeled ‘an intellectual climate.’ It is indispensable to be familiar with this ‘climate’ if one wants to understand someone who lived at a particular time. To gain a better understanding of Edwards’s views, therefore, we should have a closer look at both the Enlightenment era in which he lived and the religious movement of his time, the First Great Awakening. The term First Great Awakening refers to a unique religious revival that took place in many American colonies, especially in the years 1720–1742.9 The First Great Awakening is often related to the preaching of certain individuals; for example, the beginning of the First Great Awakening is related to the arrival of Theodor Frelinghuysen in New Jersey in 1720.10 During the second and third decades of the eighteenth century, the Reformed and Presbyterian Churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey experienced a religious renewal thanks to the preaching of William Tennent. Tennent once described an event that well portrays the nature of the Awakening: “While I was preaching from Psalms 119:59, 60, I observed many of the assembly in tears, and heard many crying out in the very great bitterness of soul.”11 Similar occurrences of enthusiasm took place in 1734–35 in a Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, as a result of Jonathan Edwards’s preaching. It is important to remember that the phenomena of trembling, shaking, and convulsions occurred not only in the ministry of Jonathan Edwards but was a general phenomenon during the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening reached its peak in the 1740s during the ministry of the itinerant preacher George Whitefield.12 The result of the Great Awakening was a massive increase in the number of people in churches, due to the theological emphasis on a need for individual, conscious conversion. 9 William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), XIII. 10 Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1691–1747) was a German minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. Having arrived in New Jersey in 1720, he quickly became very popular within the Dutch community. Gilbert Tennent acknowledged that he learned a lot about piety and revival from him. Both Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield held his ministry in high esteem. See Randall H. Balmer, The Social Roots of Dutch Pietism in Middle Colonies (Virginia: Theological Publications, 1984), 187–99. 11 Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening, A History of the Revival of Religion in the time of Edwards & Whitefield (Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, Reprinted 1997, First published 1842), 137. 12 George Whitefield (1714–1779). See more in Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield. The life and times of the great evangelist of the 18th century revival (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1970).

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The period in which Jonathan Edwards lived was also defined by the theological and philosophical changes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 Philosophy flourished during this time; its goal was not only to acquire knowledge for its own sake, but also to use it for the enhancement of public life. For this reason, philosophers call philosophy of this time period “practical philosophy” or “philosophy in practice.”14 Initially, it was termed “a philosophy of Enlightenment,” but due to the tremendous influence it exerted on practically every sphere of contemporary society, the entire period of its domination is called the Enlightenment.15 John Locke’s seminal essay in 1690 in which he wrote about the empirical origins of knowledge, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, defined Enlightenment philosophy; ever after, the way that people reason became the main theme of philosophical debates. The goal and attempt of these debates was to set reason free from external influence and emotion.16 The human mind of the individual became a primary virtue. All kinds of authorities were questioned, as only what could be verified with your own reason was considered true and reliable. In other words, the encouragement of the Enlightenment was to have courage to use your own reason. The main thrust of philosophy turned against religion, and belief in the supernatural started to be regarded as backwardness. By testing faith against reason, many tried to cleanse it, this time of ‘superstitions’, and thus create a ‘rational religion.’17 In the eighteenth century, intellectuals got rid of the old system of establishing truth; instead of seeking truth and wisdom in biblical revelation, they tried to build knowledge basing everything on the human mind. The outcome of these new methods of acquiring knowledge were new ideas: Hegel stated that God is not a personal being as described in the Bible, but an impersonal force. Both Kant and Schleiermacher argued that religion has more to do with human religious experience than God. Hume claimed that it is impossible to prove the existence of God. Given this Enlightenment context, during Edwards’s time, claiming an experience of God could easily be regarded as madness, especially if combined with dreams, visions, and involuntary bodily manifestations. The term “madness,” is “the oldest and the most widely used term to denote mental disease”; while it originally meant crippled, hurt or foolish, it came to mean the loss of reason or 13 P. Kunzmann, Atlas Filozofii (Warszawa: PWN, 1999), 102–145. Key figures in this period include John Locke (1632–1704), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), George Berkley (1685–1753), David Hume (1711–1776), Adam Smith (1723–1790), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Immunal Kant (1724–1804). 14 W. Tatarkiewicz, Historia filozofii (Warszawa: PWN, 1978), 92. 15 Tatarkiewicz, Historia filozofii, 92. 16 Jeffery L. Powell, “An Enlightened Madness,” Human Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 311. 17 Powell, “An Enlightened Madness,” 311.

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self-restraint.18 In eighteenth century was also a time in which medical science developed, and less and less credence was given to the supernatural as a cause of madness or mental illness. Instead, the mentally ill were regarded as suffering from some mysterious disease.19 Before the eighteenth century, all kinds of behaviors which after the Enlightenment would be regarded as a mental illness were considered to be possession or witchcraft. Some mentally disturbed people may have been victims of the witch hunts that spread in waves in early modern Europe and America.20 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also represented the beginning of modern psychiatry, and one might expect that the end of the witch hunting would bring with it a necessary understanding of human dignity to the people considered mentally ill. However, “It should not be assumed that the inclusion of abnormal behavior within the domain of hospitals and medicine necessarily led to more humane and moral treatment. Medical treatments were often crude and painful.”21 Since madness was not regarded as having spiritual causes or involving the soul or moral responsibility, but increasingly seen as an organic physical phenomenon, the mentally ill were typically viewed as insensitive wild animals, and all different kinds of manifestations (described as the animal passions) were supposed to be suppressed through harsh treatment or restraint in chains. For example, Benjamin Rush, a leader of the American Enlightenment and an enthusiastic supporter of the American Revolution who is also considered the “Father of American Psychiatry,” published the first textbook on the subject of mental illness in the United States in 1812, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind.22 Rush believed that many mental illnesses were caused by an excess of blood in the brain. Some of his treatments were to draw great quantities of blood from the mentally ill or to use a “Tranquilizer Chair”23 with the idea that “procedures that allowed for bleeding, vomiting and purging were employed to treat the mentally ill in the hope of restoring balance to the bodily systems.”24 This was the main method of treatment until August of 1793, 18 J.T. Dalby, “Terms of Madness: Historical Linguistics,” Comprehensive Psychiatry 34 (6): 393– 4. 19 Amariah Brigham, “The Moral Treatment of Insanity,” American Journal of Psychiatry 151, no. 6 (1994): 12. 20 Thomas J. Schoeneman, “The Role of Mental Illness in the European Witch Hunts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: An Assessment”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13, no. 4 (1977): 344. 21 J.M. Neale, G. C. Davison, and D. A. F. Haaga, Exploring Abnormal Psychology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 22. 22 Alyn Brodsky, Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician (New York: Truman Talley Books, 2004). 23 Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 16. 24 B. Clouette and P. Deslandes, “The Hartford Retreat for the Insane: An Early Example of the Use of Moral Treatment in America,” Connecticut Medicine 61, no. 9 (1997): 525.

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when Frenchman Philippe Pinel presented his philosophy that persons with mental illness should be treated as individuals suffering from a disease, which had a differential diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy; he also strongly argued for the humane treatment of mental patients.25 As we can see, in the Enlightenment era, physically expressed religious experiences or descriptions of contact with the divine may have either been seen as anti-intellectual belief at best, and at worst, the delusions of the mentally ill.

11.3 Edwards’s Understanding of Enthusiasm While Edwards would never neglect the modern discoveries of science and new trends in philosophical thoughts, he also desired to be faithful to biblical revelation in the Old and New Testaments. The many facets of religious experience were central to Edwards’s life and thought. He is the author of many works which discuss the topic of religious experience, one of the most famous being A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). The intellectual basis of religious experience and revivalism constructed in these works sparked a new philosophy and psychology of emotions. William James used Edwards’s Treatise in his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which was one of the first attempts to analyze the Christian religious experience since Edwards.26 However, it is Edwards’s sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to be both a Scriptural, and Rational Doctrine that has more significance for understanding Edwards’s understanding of enthusiasm and his response to the Enlightenment aversion to religious experience. A Divine and Supernatural Light is not as popular Edwards’s A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections or his most famous sermon, Sinners in the hands of an angry God.27 However, several scholars recognize it as an extremely sig25 Marianne Woodside and Tricia McClam, An Introduction to the Human Services (Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2012), 104. Pinel rejected the prevailing popular notion that mental illness was caused by demonic possession or manifested the consequences of sin. He believed that mental disorders could be caused by psychological or social stress, congenital conditions, or physiological injury. 26 William James wrote “his compendious ‘Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature’, which joined Edwards’ ‘Religious Affections’ as a profound study in both the psychology and philosophy of religion. Significantly, James quotes Edwards in his ‘Varieties.’” See R. Hall, “Jonathan Edwards & William James on Religion,” William James Studies 9 (2012): 59. 27 Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” caused a great number of bodily manifestations when it was preached on July 8, 1741, in Enfield, Connecticut. Edwards wasn’t able to finish the preaching of this sermon as the gathered crowd started to cry out loud. At first, we might think that these effects were caused only by the content of the message. Nevertheless,

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nificant example of Edwards’s thought; for example, George M. Marsden claims, “This sermon, ‘A Divine and Supernatural Light’, encapsulates better than any other single source the essence of his spiritual insight. In it he provided a sort of constitution for any true awakening.”28 Perry Miller states concerning this sermon, “It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Edwards’ system is contained in miniature within some ten or twelve pages in this work.”29 Therefore, understanding the message of this sermon can shed light on Edwards’s views regarding the phenomenon of enthusiasm that happened during the Great Awakening, both from a theological and a philosophical perspective. Edwards preached Divine and Supernatural Light in 1733, and the following year, the sermon became his second published work. During the eighteenth century, evangelical sermons were not intentionally preached to touch peoples’ emotions. Rather, in mainline Puritanism emotions were subjected to the intellect.30 Nevertheless, the change that occurred in the understanding of the human nature (for example through the works of Locke)31 started to also influence the rhetoric of the preachers.32 There are different examples of preachers who believed that the word preached must be from the heart (meaning with affections) because only then would it reach the hearts of the listeners.33 Edwards proposes in Divine and Supernatural Light that mind and body correspond with each other and naturally influence each other. As such, Edwards defended emotions and affections in the religious experience.34 In other words, Edwards proposed that what is true in the natural realm is true in the spiritual realm. For example, in the natural world, thinking about good food producing salivation. The same is true in the spiritual realm: thinking about or seeing the beauty of God or the terror of hell must influence the body, which will react in a certain kinesthetic manifestation. If that is the truth, the preacher must be able to not only persuade the audience by logical explanations, but he must use such pictures that will stir the imagination so that people can see the beauty or the

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

we find similar (and other) manifestations that happened during other occasions with Edwards, and even other preachers in other locations. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 157. Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloan, 1949), 44. Robert Middlekauff, “Piety and Intellect in Puritanism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 22 (1965): 457–70. For example, Perry Miller, Peter Gay, Bruce Kuklick, and Wayne Proudfoot all state that the influence of Locke on Edwards was immense. See Chris Chun, The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller (Boston: Brill, 2012), 87. Eugene Edmond White, Puritan Rhetoric: The Issue of Emotion in Religion (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 1–64; Norman S. Fiering, “Will and Intellect in the New England Mind,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 29 (1972): 515–58. Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace, Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81. Conkin, Puritans & Pragmatists, 59.

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terror of the holiness of God. The sermon cannot bring the true blessing to listener unless it can influence both the mind and the heart (affections). Likely this understanding of mind and body is why Edwards held to a balanced view in which he allowed for some kinds of manifestations during his ministry, despite the risk of being judged as enthusiast by his opponents. In his ministry, Edwards was confronted with manifestations of ecstatic religious experience, According to Edwards, the manifestations were not only occasional experiences but a regular and frequent: The months of August and September [1741] were the most remarkable of any this year, for appearances of conviction and conversion of sinners, and great revivings, quickenings, and comforts of professors, and for extraordinary external effects of these things. It was a very frequent thing to see an house full of outcries, faintings, convulsions and such like, both with distress, and also with admiration and joy. It was not the manner here to hold meetings all night, as in some places, nor was it common to continue ’em till very late in the night: but it was pretty often, so that there were some that were so affected, and their bodies so overcome, that they could not go home, but were obliged to stay all night at the house where they were.35

Another example given by Edwards is in regards to the behavior of a child, which seems to be more intense form of trembling or shaking: “She continued exceedingly crying, and wreathing her body to and fro, like one in anguish of spirit.”36 According to Edwards scholar Kenneth Minkema, such behavior during meetings like “cryings-out” and “moanings” “did occur within Puritan Churches.”37 Describing his church in 1741, Edwards describes a bodily manifestation in which people were losing their physical strength. Perhaps similar to what is presently called in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles as “being slain in the Spirit” or “falling under the power,” Edwards discusses people “who have had their bodily strength taken away,” others who “had their love and joy attended with a flood of tears,” and also others “overcome with pity to the souls of others, and longing for their salvation.”38 This kind of phenomena when “bodily strength was overcome” was also an experience of Edwards’s wife Sarah.39 In another case, his ministry was accompanied by “Groans & Screaches as of Women in the Pains of Childbirth; but above these were Houlings and Yellings, which to Even a Carnal

35 Describing the revival of 1740–1742, see WJE 16:118. 36 WJE 4:200. 37 James Beverley, Revival Wars. A Critique of Counterfeit Revival (Canada: Evangelical Research Ministries, 1997), 29. 38 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of President Edwards: In Four Volumes with Valuable Additions and a Copious General Index, and a Complete Index of Scripture Texts, vol. 1, (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1881), 550. 39 G Guy Chevreau, Catch the Fire, The Toronto Blessings: An experience of Renewal and Revival (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1995), 77.

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man might point out Hell.”40 Edwards also mentioned the raptures of joy, especially as the reaction of people who experienced conversion: “Their joyful surprise has caused their hearts as it were to leap, so that they have been ready to break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood and intermingling a loud weeping; and sometimes they han’t been able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.”41 In all of this, Edwards was trying “to understand and make sense of ecstatic phenomena as a natural response to a sense of guilt or the realization of forgiveness.”42 Scholar M.C. Lee calls it “psychology of religion”.43 Although Edwards was not against them, Lee states that “there is no indication that he ever encouraged such manifestations.”44 Perhaps Edwards saw these manifestations as a natural effect of new birth of conversion; Edwards wrote that If they wait to see a work of God without difficulties and stumbling blocks, that will be like the fool’s waiting at the riverside to have the water all run by. A work of God without stumbling blocks is never to be expected: ”It must needs be that offenses come” [Matthew 18:7]. There never yet was any great manifestation that God made of himself to the world, without many difficulties attending it.45

All of this behavior was allowed as the outward manifestation of the inward work of the Spirit of God and the experience of being born again in which the person was receiving the divine and supernatural light which was responsible for creating the new spiritual sense, “the sense of the heart.” In the sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards presents a great vision of God’s love and mercy that flows into the human soul in a supernatural way through the channel called “the new spiritual sense.” In short, Edwards’s doctrine of religious experience expressed in this sermon is, “There is such a thing, as a spiritual and divine light, immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means.”46 In the sermon, the most important ideas are about the “divine light” and “the sense of the heart.” Edwards used this phrase “the sense of the heart” for the first time in this sermon, and later utilizes it again in Miscellanies (732 and 782), as well as A Treatise 40 Epstein Irwin Grigg, The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20. 41 WJE 4:174–175. Another example: “Their joyful surprise has caused their hearts as it were to leap; tears issuing like a flood, intermingled with their joy; and sometimes they have not been able to forbear expressing with a loud voice their great admiration, and sometimes ready to faint.” WJE 4:125. 42 Mark C. Lee, The Great Awakening: Testimonies of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield (Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2016), 156. 43 Lee, The Great Awakening, 156. 44 Lee, The Great Awakening, 166. 45 WJE 4:273. 46 WJE 17:410.

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Concerning Religious Affections. In Edwards’s exploration of religious experience, the concept of “the sense of the heart” is also the way to understand what is true or false religion. It is worthy to note that A Divine and Supernatural Light is a sermon because usually Edwards was praised by those who loved his philosophy, but his preaching ministry was not as much appreciated.47 The foundational text for Divine and Supernatural Light is Matthew 16:17: “And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.”48 Edwards starts his analysis with an approach characteristic of Thomism, which is first to describe what something (“divine light”) is not. According to Edwards, only God can give this spiritual light; furthermore, it cannot be understood by the mind, but rather it must be experienced by the heart.49 Edwards goes on to state that supernatural revelation is required to fully appreciate this idea. Everybody can learn about the things of God, but then it is only the “knowledge of God,” and it is never the same as “acquaintance with God.” Edwards speaks not only about the “light” but also about “heat.” The “light” brings revelation together with this “heat,” and this idea is supposed to show that spiritual knowledge is not only speculative. Only when speculative knowledge is combined with experiential knowledge, the affections of human are influenced, which at the end produces the right acts of the human. For Edwards, the experience of God is central when it comes to true religion. As mentioned before, one of Edwards’s favorite phrases was “the sense of the heart.” In accordance with the spirit of his age, he exhibited an emotional view of reality, in which the “feeling heart” was the basis for thought and action. Religious feelings are a sign of recognition of the divine perfection, a recognition which happens with the heart rather than the head. Therefore, he was a leading figure in the emerging ‘New England Theology’, which mainly dealt with issues such as the splendor and glory of God and the supernatural life immersed in the beauty of holiness. Edwards’ philosophy, [by] insisting on a spontaneous flow between men’s inner principles and their actions so that their spiritual state was constantly on trial and renewed, …had explicitly rejected the rhetoric and do-good morality of a degenerate Puritanism… his conception of experiential religion [was based] on a psychology that denied either the possibility of getting outside oneself or of one’s principles aloof from the ambiguities of action…50

47 WJE 16:729. 48 WJE 17:408. 49 Jonathan Edwards, Growing in God’s Spirit, ed. T. M. Moore (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2003), 11. 50 Gail Thain Parker, “Jonathan Edwards and Melancholy,” The New England Quarterly 41 (1968): 211–12.

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Accordingly, the main thrust of Edwards’s preaching was the call to people to experience “the new birth.” It is clearly presented also in this sermon that this event, as the beginning of faith, enables one to know God’s presence and abide in it. Edwards agreed with the classic Protestant view of justification by grace through faith. Edwards found confirmation of the necessity of being “born again” in one’s life in the Bible (he spoke of the Bible as the source and the norm of his theology).51 Jesus himself said, “You must be born again” (John 3:7), and according to Edwards, Christ was not speaking about any outward transformation of life done by an individual, as this would be an obvious thing. A truly transformed life can only be the result of God’s work, creating a “new spiritual disposition.” This regeneration is so crucial that it must be observable in a person’s attitude, and the confirmation of this change for this person must be the inner testimony of the Spirit. Edwards gives a definition of “the spiritual and divine light,” which according to him is “a true sense of the divine excellency of the things revealed in the Word of God, and a conviction of the truth and reality of them, thence arising.”52 Therefore the most distinctive hallmark of those who believe is love. Divine light “draws forth the heart in a sincere love to God, which is the only principle of a true, gracious and universal obedience. And it convinces of the reality of those glorious rewards that God has promised to them that obey him.”53 God pours this light into the heart through the Holy Spirit who dwells within believers. Because of this love, they long for Christ and to rest in his arms. A natural consequence of the love of God is love for other people. It surpasses any human understanding, enabling one to love even enemies. If this true love is poured into the heart of a believer, he is bound to keep God’s commands. Everyone who loves God with all his heart cannot but serve God with all his strength. What Edwards taught about the signs of being “born again” makes clear that he identified “the new birth” with an utter, thoroughgoing transformation of a person’s condition. This change was not only to be evident in personal piety but also in the social aspect of interpersonal relations. To receive this “new sense of heart” means that the whole person is completely filled with God’s love. That being so, Edwards’s use of the phrase refers here to the perfection of God’s love that fills the whole person with the fullness of God. The utmost consequence of the “new sense of heart” is living in God’s love: A true sense of the glory of God is that which can never be obtained by speculative; and if men convince themselves by the argument that God is holy, that never will give a sense of 51 Michael Haykin, Jonathan Edwards: The Holy Spirit in Revival (New York: Evangelical Press, 2005), 117. 52 WJE 17:413. 53 WJE 17:425.

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his amiable and glorious holiness. If they argue that he is very merciful, that will not give a sense of his glorious grace and mercy. It must be a more immediate, sensible discovery that must give the mind a real sense of the excellency and beauty of God.54

A soul filled with Christ loves him so much that it wants nothing else but to know Christ better. This is why a “new spiritual disposition” is necessary to be fully immersed in the perfect love of Christ; with this “new spiritual disposition,” the whole person belong to Christ, and person and Christ are united in the experience of love. Edwards believed that true religion is a matter of the affections. The soul, as the deepest source of the self, inspires thoughts, feelings, and even choices that come out of the heart. That is why the soul’s affections must be revived. This religious experience of spiritual revival opens the soul to see the beauty, majesty, and holiness of God. It transforms people’s minds, wills, and emotions.

11.4 Conclusion “Enthusiasm” has been described as the intellectual opposite of the Enlightenment, its “anti-self” because it stood for a religion of the “heart” rather than the “head.” Nevertheless, Edwards shows that there is the possibility of a relationship between religious enthusiasm and enlightened philosophy. Edwards clearly argued throughout his works that religion is not primarily an affair of the intellect, but an affair of the heart.55 He rejected an intellectualism that does not move the heart. Nevertheless, he insisted on the whole-person transformation by grace to Christ. Therefore, we must note his insistence on the use and place of the mind in religious experience because he also remains suspicious of spirituality which does not engage the mind: Edwards sought more than anything to make Christ a totally engaging Person for his people. But this is not to say that Edwards repudiated logic or that he ignored the importance of propositional understanding. Again the Religious Affections serves as a model. Carefully reasoned and rigorously logical, Edwards therein presents a full-blown analysis of an essential part of the Christian life, a part which must be thoroughly and propositionally known if the individual’s spiritual life is to be full, complete, and true.56

54 Sermon on Matthew 5:8 (‘Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.’) in: The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 906. 55 Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758: A Biography (New York: Macmillan 1940), 232. 56 Samuel T. Logan, Jr., “The Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards,” Westminster Theological Journal 43, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 91.

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Unlike his contemporaries who viewed enthusiasm as potential madness, for Edwards, true madness was “willfully and wickedly rejecting Jesus Christ.”57 He clearly presents it in his sermon The Manner in which the Salvation of the Soul is to be Sought where he states: “If you will not hearken to the many warnings which are given you of approaching destruction, you will be guilty of more than brutish madness”.58 In his sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, we clearly see that Edwards defended the place of emotion in religious experience as part of the human will; at the same time, he did not believe that subjective experience alone could serve as the source of religious authority. According to him, nobody could rely solely on their own spiritual experience. Edwards’s insistence is on a whole-person consecration to God; for him, religious experience is not a product of only the reason or emotion, but it is an integrated experience in which the whole being of the subject is immersed in the love and beauty of God.

57 Jonathan Edwards, Sermons of Jonathan Edwards (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2005), 182. 58 Edwards, Sermons, 182.

Lucas Hardy (Youngstown State University)

Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of Pain

12.1 A Genealogy of Protestant Pain In a diary entry dated November 26, 1723, Jonathan Edwards makes a curious observation about the nature of suffering: “’Tis a most evil and pernicious practice in meditations on afflictions, to sit ruminating on the aggravations of the affliction, and reckoning up the evil, dark circumstances thereof, and dwelling long on the dark side; it doubles and trebles the affliction.”1 It is perhaps a familiar recommendation by twenty-first century standards to eschew pain and its effects, but for Edwards’s day, the suggestion is perplexing. He appears in his diary to dismiss a call commonly made by Puritan divines for the faithful to ponder the spiritual significance of pain. The minister William Perkins, for instance, had urged the repentant to discover emblems of grace in pain and misfortune.2 He remarked that “affliction” referred to “all manner of miseries and calamities in this life, from the least to the greatest, from the paine of the little finger, to the very pangs of death.”3 Recommending that sufferers should meditate on pain in order to find “comfort,” he observed that “afflictions doe make men see and consider their sinnes.”4 Three decades later, John Cotton, writing in New England, considered both sickness and the loss of property to be “sweet and wholesome” varieties of affliction capable of improving spiritual progress.5 The 1 WJE 16:782. 2 English theologian William Perkins (1558–1602) was one of the earliest and most influential leaders in the Puritan movement. His preaching prompted the conversions of eminent American Puritan settlers, including John Cotton and John Winthrop. For an introduction to Perkins’s life and ministry, see Ian Breward, “The Significance of William Perkins,” Journal of Religious History 4, no. 2 (1966): 113–128. 3 William Perkins, Treatise of Conscience (New York: Da Capo Press Inc., 1972), 118. The original title of Perkins’s text, published in Cambridge 1606, is The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience. 4 Perkins, Treatise of Conscience, 125. 5 John Cotton, The Way of Life, or God’s Way and Course (London, 1641), 37. The English-born minister John Cotton (1585–1652) attended Cambridge University. In 1633, he emigrated to

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faithful should look upon their sicknesses and injuries as “gifts of God’s grace,” he argued.6 Two generations after John Cotton, Cotton Mather, in a 1711 sermon, echoed the orthodoxy’s belief that pain should lead to spiritual improvement. Referring to Jeremiah 5.3 and citing John Calvin, he criticized those who “refused to receive Correction” after they had “felt the Plagues of Heaven, with Grief and Pain.”7 Consensus dictated that by contemplating pain and hardship, sufferers would be suitably chastened and primed for spiritual conversion.8 Like Cotton Mather, William Perkins, Increase Mather, and other Puritan ministers participated in a discourse of spiritual suffering first advanced in the sixteenth century by John Calvin. Considering the nuances of Protestant pain, Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen writes that though Calvin “reiterates the idea that… suffering is a crucial aspect of Christian identity, he denies the soteriological effect of this, and maintains that it is only God who works through pain, not humans themselves. Suffering…should not, therefore, be actively sought, but only accepted when it presented itself.”9 Where Catholic doctrine had commonly taught the faithful to seek salvation by soliciting and sharing in Christ’s pain, Calvin’s reformed theology rejected such an invitation to suffer. Yet even if the faithful were advised not to seek pain, Calvin was willing to admit that pain was a powerful emetic for sin, an acute sort of motivation to correct backsliding tendencies among the repentant. In the Diary, Edwards unsettles this tradition of pain by casting it as a dubious part of religious experience. He insists that people had spent too much time protesting their suffering, “all the while making new Trouble and feeding…the old.” Affliction, he admonishes, must be “starve[d]”

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Massachusetts, where he quickly became a distinguished preacher and central figure in the public life of the young colony. For a foundational study of Cotton’s life and legacy, see Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). Cotton, Way of Life, 473. Cotton Mather, “The Voice of God, Crying to the City,” Days of Humiliation: Times of Affliction and Disaster, (Gainesville: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), 142. The American minister Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was the maternal grandson of John Cotton. Mather attended Harvard University and was installed as minister of Boston’s North Church in 1685, immediately succeeding his father, Increase Mather. Like his father and grandfather, Mather was an influential, though often polarizing, public figure. For a study of Mather’s life and career, see Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). As Patricia Watson summarizes, “New England divines used episodes of sickness—both individual cases and epidemics—as an opportunity to encourage good Christians to confront those personal sins which might have caused the affliction,” see The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 13. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, vol. 31, Studies in Renaissance Literature (Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 68.

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by “dwell[ing] on the light Side of Things in our Thoughts.”10 Edwards’s departure from the Protestant tradition of affliction is compelling in itself. Yet he makes an even more striking wager in his diary by challenging at its core the empirical philosophy of pain that pervaded the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. He proposes separating the painful part of affliction—sense perception— from the faculties of understanding that processed painful events. The afflicted mind, he insinuates, may “starve” the very pain that maligned it, and it may become capable of thinking new and enlightened things, even as it feels pain. I aim in the following pages to show that Edwards views pain not as an opportunity for identifying sin and improving piety, as earlier Calvinists had, but as an inclination of the will that revealed persons to be in the lowest condition of human existence: the state of “natural man.” I contend that as he describes the character of the “spiritual man,” or the visible “saint” who converts out of a natural condition, Edwards shows how the mind changes its orientation toward the natural body, which is inherently in a condition of pain. In advancing his conception of pain, Edwards dismisses John Locke’s familiar premise that pain was a “simple idea” responsible for shaping both consciousness and human identity. The theory of pain Edwards develops remains theoretical and abstract in many of his texts, but his case study of Abigail Hutchinson in the Faithful Narrative (1737) brings into focus a suffering person who emblemizes spiritual conversion and saintliness in the face of great pain. Hutchinson reveals the manner by which a self not defined by pain becomes agreeable to God and capable of enacting love to God by loving all created beings. Her story, a quintessential example of spiritual awakening from the height of Edwards’s career, bridges the aesthetics of pain advanced in his fragmentary essay on “The Mind” with the ethics of benevolence and excellence he considered in his final—and posthumously-published—work, The Nature of True Virtue (1765). Finally, I glimpse The Life of David Brainerd (1749) to prove how, in the example of the evangelist David Brainerd, Edwards shows moral life appearing when a person is no longer determined by pain.

12.2 Sensing Pain–An Ontology of Edwardsean Pain “The work of redemption,” writes Amy Plantinga Pauw, “formed the centerpiece of Jonathan Edwards’s reflections on God’s relation to the created world.” She asserts, “Its aim is intimate, eternal fellowship between God and human crea-

10 WJEO 16:782.

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tures, and their mutual glory and happiness.”11 Echoing the Puritan orthodoxy, Edwards writes, “Mankind are, as they are born into the world, universally of an unholy nature and, therefore, they can’t be made holy but by a change of nature.”12 But where earlier divines recommended that the repentant use scriptural and homiletic means to prepare the heart for grace, Edwards suggests that regeneration demands more than incremental changes in temperament or improvements in religious conviction as outlined in church doctrine.13 His conversion morphology is most carefully and eloquently pronounced in Religious Affections (1754), where he reconciles the intellectual and emotional parts of regeneration with lived experiences that testify to the reception of grace and spiritual rebirth. Though he treads familiar doctrinal turf in the Affections, he outlines a more radical form of conversion than other divines of the period. To him, conversion demanded a transformation in being from the “natural man,” who is without grace, to the “spiritual man,” who is “sanctified’ and gracious.”14 Natural man, he says, is a “sensual” and “carnal” being.15 Put differently, persons in their natural states are conditioned only by the perception of created objects and beings in the universe. Citing 1 Corinthians 2:14–15, he writes, “‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things.’”16 The former person lacks the inward sense required to comprehend “the loveliness of God” and to “desire conformity to God.”17 The latter, by contrast, is given to what Edwards famously calls a “new spiritual sense.”18 This new sense enables the mind’s consent to God, who Ed-

11 Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 119. 12 Jonathan Edwards, “The Reality of Conversion,” The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeny (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 85. 13 For more on American Puritan conversion theology, see Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Perry Miller, especially “The Means of Conversion,” The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 280–299; Edmund Morgan, especially “The New England System,” Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 64–112; and Norman Pettit, especially “Preparation and the Problem of the Heart,” The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1–21. 14 “Showing what are Distinguishing Signs of Truly Gracious and Holy Affections,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 2, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 198. 15 WJE 2:198. 16 WJE 2:197. 17 WJE 2:208. 18 WJE 2:205–207.

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wards defines as “Being in general” and “who transcends creatures that exist only in partial and particular ways,” as Michael J. McClymond observes.19 Spiritual man perceives and judges from a new cognitive stance in this theology, but his new sense of things is not intended simply to improve his mind or to help him obtain intellectual knowledge of grace. In fact, it’s not even precisely the person’s mind or soul—those spiritual parts of the human—with which Edwards is chiefly concerned. He’s denoting instead in the Affections the ontological correspondence between human understanding and, as he says, “the Spirit of God” or the “Holy Ghost” when emphasizing the new spiritual sense.20 The regenerate man is not spiritual simply because his mind is elevated to a new perceptual state but because in his transformation, he is able to demonstrate the grace he has obtained by judging and comprehending a new kind of beauty.21 Sang Hyun Lee observes that the spiritual mind “could not have an idea of beauty without having something beautiful in the mind—namely, the mind’s own agreement to the object, that is, the mind’s pleasure.”22 According to Lee, there are two planes on which the mind is sensible of beauty. “To ‘sense’ beauty is to be pleased by beauty,” whereas “a sensible knowledge of beauty is more than a feeling of pleasure.” Generally, “the sense of beauty is the habit of the mind, the direction of the whole self,” he observes.23 Such a complete sense of beauty and pleasure demands that the mind incline only toward what is beautiful and pleasing, and not toward the sort of deformity that occurs in the shadows of excellency, where entities stand alone, “without reference to any more.”24 By this logic, Lee suggest, the mind must complete the arduous task of achieving its own spiritual beauty before it corresponds with Being in general, since the human mind, in its natural form, is “sensual” and “carnal,” as Edwards makes clear. The essence of Edwardsean conversion begins when the mind reflects on itself in a radically new way. Specifically, the mind must not be influenced by pain if it means to become spiritual—for pain “is an approach” to “nothing,” says Edwards, and so it directs the mind away from 19 Michael J. McClymond, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31. 20 WJE 2:198. 21 Roland Delattre suggests that two types of beauty are found in Edwards: “secondary or natural” beauty, which consists of “an image of a higher form of beauty;” and “primary or spiritual” beauty, which is characterized by “being’s cordial consent to being in general,” which is “peculiar to moral agents and relations.” He submits that in this model, “beauty is defined as the consent of being to being; dissent from being constitutes deformity.” Roland André Delattre, “Beauty and Theology: A Reappraisal of Jonathan Edwards,” Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards, ed. William J. Scheick (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980), 138–139. 22 Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 154. 23 Lee, Philosophical Theology, 155. 24 “The Mind,” in WJE 6, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 337.

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excellency, or the highest aesthetic state characterized by the consent of being to being.25 His inquiry into pain’s aesthetic implications in “The Mind” begins with a remark on sensation at the most basic level: “Agreeableness of perceiving being is pleasure, and disagreeableness is pain. Disagreement or contrariety to being is evidently an approach to nothing…which is…the greatest and only evil, and entity is the greatest and only good,” he writes.26 To redirect the self toward conversion and spiritual being—that is, toward a sense of beauty—the mind must perceive only what agrees with being, and not what disagrees.

12.3 Pain and Understanding: Edwards contra John Locke Pain was typified both as a physiological response to bodily injury and, adjacently, as a moral condition associated with “evil” in the eighteenth century. Edwards engages most directly with John Locke’s conception of pain, and he takes particular issue with the ethics Locke had attributed to pain in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).27 Locke identified in man a form of consciousness derived purely from the perception of external sensations and internal reflections; he considered the “discerning faculties of a man, as they are employed about the objects, which they have to do with,” to be the first and only things with which human minds were concerned.28 Understanding was furnished by ideas the mind apprehended through sense perception, whether those ideas were gathered from sensations external or internal to the body. He conceptualized pain accordingly, as a “simple idea” that signaled harm to both the body (a burn, for instance) and the mind (grief or melancholy, for example). It 25 WJE 6:336. 26 WJE 6:335. 27 John Locke (1632–1704) is regarded as the founder of British empiricism. His most substantial work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, details at great length the processes of sensation and perception and describes the faculties of mind. Locke’s influence on Edwards is well documented. The first critical examination of Edwards’s debt to Locke can be found in Perry Miller’s Jonathan Edwards, which first appeared in 1949. Miller argued that Edwards’s views of divinity, and of the world itself, were shaped by reading Locke’s Essay. “[Edwards] read Locke, and the divine strategy was revealed to him,” Miller asserts (53). His claims are persuasive and, arguably, accurate; Edwards’s work, especially his conception of mind, is saturated with Lockean principles. See Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Paul Helm has also evaluated the many appearances of Locke in Edwards’s thought, but he cautions that while Edwards readily incorporated Locke’s philosophy into his own, Edwards was not the thoroughgoing “empiricist” Miller had depicted. See in particular Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 7, no. 1 (January 1969): 51–61; and “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and Religious Affections,” Jonathan Edwards Studies 6, no. 1 (2016): 3–15. 28 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (New York: Penguin, 1997), 55.

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was nearly impossible to disassociate the faculties of understanding from those temporal “objects…they have to do with,” since they enabled thinking and effectively formed consciousness. Given that Locke’s conception of understanding was interwoven with the things that comprised the material universe, his definition of the mind fell into the same taxonomic frame as Edwards’s natural man: the person whose mind is “corrupt” because it employs only those faculties of sense perception given at birth.29 Always an experience of sensation or reflection, pain rooted consciousness firmly within the natural body by signifying the connection between the nervous system and the mind. Locke’s inherently material basis for consciousness therefore prevented the mind from developing into a truly spiritual being of the variety Edwards sought. To Locke, pain was a simple idea God gave to man in order to turn him away from existential threats. In fact, it provided an “occasion of admiring the wisdom and goodness of our maker” for “designing the preservation of our being,” he reasoned. Pain permitted persons to “be warned to withdraw, before the organ be quite put out of order, and so be unfitted for its proper functions for use.”30 By the end of the seventeenth century, pain, particularly in English scientific circles, was regarded as a stimulus that provoked involuntary responses intended to direct the body away from danger; it was a physiological necessity designed to promote human survival.31 But Locke’s brand of empiricism went even further, promoting an ethics of pain by turning it into a form of power that shaped consciousness and determined selfhood. Greg Foster has remarked that “pleasure and pain are two of the most important ideas in Locke’s epistemology…Locke’s larger accounts of agency, will, freedom, and law can all be traced back to the fundamentals of pleasure and pain… Pleasure and pain, especially pain, are the only two motives for action that Locke finds in the human mind.”32 At once a basic constituent of understanding and a divine gift, pain was vital both to human survival and moral being. Edwards often finds Locke’s proposals on the powers and faculties of understanding serviceable to his own theory of mind, but he disagreed vehemently with Locke about pain’s place in consciousness.33 As humans are visited, time and again, by pain, illness, and suffering, they are inhibited from achieving spiritual 29 WJE 2:198. 30 Locke, Essay, 131. 31 Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise Elliot Wallace, J.A. Cadden, and S.W. Cadden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 81. 32 Greg Foster, John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 196. 33 Since he first considered human understanding in “The Mind,” Edwards had promoted the perception of proportionality, similarity among variety, and excellency as the hallmarks of the spiritual mind.

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harmony. Pain is a formidable adversary, an “evil,” not in its basic physiological function—in signaling harm to human beings—but because it is an idea rooted in bodily sensation and reflection that forecloses spiritual transformation. In order to propose a way of escaping pain’s grasp on consciousness, then, Edwards takes the bold step of dismissing entirely Locke’s hypothesis that pain and pleasure were ideas.34 “Pleasure and pain are not ideas,” he submits in “The Mind,” “though they may imply perception in their nature….An idea is only a perception wherein the mind is passive.” He concedes, vis-à-vis Locke, that ideas are constituted when the mind perceives sensations, but pain, by contrast, he locates “in the will, and not the understanding. The will…is nothing else but the mind’s being pleased with an idea…or a pleasedness in such a state of ourselves and a degree of pain while we are not in that state.”35 When presented with an intentional object capable of invoking the senses, the mind is free to embrace pain or, conversely, pleasure; the will can pull the mind toward deformity, or it can push it away. Still, there is a contradiction in natural man’s avoidance of pain and pursuit of pleasure—for even if the will inclines toward pleasure (in avoidance of pain), it enacts nothing more than self-preservation, or a type of care for the self that Edwards terms “self-love.”36 Self-love, figured as what Edwards calls “confined” self-love or a “selfish spirit,” is a form of concernment “which goes out after such objects as are confined and limited, such as a man’s…own worldly ease…or his pleasing and gratifying his own bodily senses.”37 Such love consists in sensorial pleasures that oppose pain, and it exists only in the created world, beneath God. Love and pleasure are polyvalent concepts for Edwards, and when they occur without reference to the body, they are regarded as “the highest excellency” expressed 34 Wallace E. Anderson contends that “In ‘The Mind’…Edwards asserts the direct opposite of Locke’s account of pleasure and pain….It is clear that Edwards understands pleasure and pain in general, not as being perceived states of sensations in the mind, but as being intentional acts; pleasure and pain are the acts of being pleased or displeased with or in something that is perceived or contemplated.” Anderson reinforces that pain and pleasure aren’t ideas for Edwards but, rather, are mental reactions to ideas. “Editor’s Introduction,” in WJE 6:130. 35 WJE 6:384. 36 Leon Chai suggests that “Edwards’s notion of perception does not really involve external objects and…we can more plausibly construe it as some kind of subjective insight.” Edwards, he says, worked at “establishing religious experiences as similar to perception or sensation… [and] by making perception an ‘inward’ act…[he] hope[d] to avoid the uncertainty associated with ordinary perception.” Perception and sense are not entirely divorced concepts in Edwards, according to Chai, but perception addresses the world external to the body, while sense would come to refer to the perception of phenomena that are purely mental. See Leon Chai, Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24. I might add that the more deeply Edwards plods into his characterization of “spiritual man,” the less he regards empirical definitions of “perception” as a useful or meaningful conduit for the apprehension of truth. 37 WJEO 8:258–259.

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through “the consent of spirits to one another,” he writes. As they perceive the created world in their natural state, however, human beings do not participate in the consent of spirits, and they are incapable of love to Being in general. Imprinted by sensing bodies, natural minds exist only in imperfect relationships to themselves and others, in an ontological zone Edwards defines as the “shadow of excellency.”38 In “The Mind,” then, pain implicitly characterizes nearly every shadowy relationship and state of being that is not specifically spiritual and excellent—that is, any relationship that does not refer to God. Roland Delattre has observed that such aesthetics are “objective, structural, and relational, rather than subjective, emotional, and relativist.”39 By establishing pain as part of this relational condition—through the will, and not as an emotional phenomenon or a state of understanding—Edwards reduces the signifying potential Locke had ascribed to pain. Without modification, pain would have remained an insurmountable idea perpetuating only self-love and continuously prohibiting the transformation to spiritual man. Since, by definition, all being that is not spiritual exists in a state of deformity for Edwards, the natural mind always perceives some degree of pain and evil; by demoting pain’s status from an idea to an inclination of the will, he limits its ability to control consciousness. Unbound from the selflove pain provokes, and primed to express love to Being in general, the mind could effectively convert to a “beautiful” spiritual state.

12.4 Abigail Hutchinson in “Extreme Pain” Abigail Hutchinson was converted near the close of the so-called “Little Awakening” that began in Edwards’s Northampton flock in the mid-1730s.40 Unlike most who were swept up in the revivalism of the period, she died just after her transformation was complete. Though her conversion was clouded by illness and her new, spiritual life was short, she demonstrates “affections that were truly spiritual and gracious” and that emerged, as Edwards writes in Religious Affections, “from those influences…on the heart, which are spiritual, supernatural, and divine.”41 She had been gravely ill for some time when she sought Edwards’s religious tutelage. Having likely suffered from anorexia, she eventually died of starvation in June of 1735.42 But for Edwards, her ability to disregard the destruction of her body and to become fixed on a “beatific vision of God” served as 38 39 40 41 42

WJE 6:337. Delattre, “Beauty and Theology,” 137. Philip F. Gura, Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 71. WJE 2:197. Gura, Jonathan Edwards, 86–87.

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an irrefutable testament to regeneration.43 In one remarkable claim from the Faithful Narrative account of Hutchinson’s conversion, Edwards recalls that her most profound fear and greatest sin was “that she had been so concerned for her body, and had applied so often to physicians to heal that, and neglected her soul” that she “saw nothing but blackness of darkness before her.”44 Where earlier Calvinists would have sought divine purpose in Hutchinson’s suffering, Edwards does not attempt to locate spiritual import by studying her bodily symptoms. Hutchinson’s illness was wholly incidental to her spiritual state. Her great error, then, was not that she failed to recognize some past sin that had compromised her health, but that by comprehending only fear in the midst of suffering, she could not undergo the truly gracious affections she sought. Her mindset epitomized Edwards’s “dark side” of affliction, and so it became necessary to discover a frame of mind that did not refer to illness or pain. Hutchinson’s sickness was severe, and Edwards’s description of her condition is striking, for she was “in extreme pain,” her throat was swollen to the point she “could swallow nothing but…liquid.” She endured “great long strugglings and stranglings,” he remarks. “She had a raging appetite for food,” he says, though she “could not swallow it.”45 Her suffering and her death were tragic, but what mattered to both Edwards and Hutchinson, respecting spiritual conversion, is that she came to disregard the acute indicators of a lethal disease in order to demonstrate the authenticity of her faith.46 The attempt to arrive on the “lighter side of things in [her] thoughts,” as Edwards would prescribe, was not a simple task—for it demanded more of consciousness than simply drawing the good from the bad or comprehending past sins by contemplating present maladies. Her faculties of mind needed to apprehend a sense of beauty and pleasure, even in the presence of pain. Hutchinson’s conversion began in earnest after several days of affections, when, as Edwards reports, concepts like “wisdom,” “goodness,” and “truth” passed through her mind, making it receptive to “God’s truth.” In this posture, he recalls, “She said it seemed as though her life was going, and that she saw it was easy with God to take away her life by discoveries of himself.” Abiding this last phase, she became “remote from any high thought of herself.”47 Her body was no 43 44 45 46

WJE 4:195. WJE 4:192. WJE 4:197. For treatment of Hutchinson and the gendered religious rhetoric of the Faithful Narrative, see Sandra Gustafson, “Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘feminine’ Speech,” American Literary History 6, no. 2 (1994): 185–212. See also Shitsuyo Masui, “Female Piety and Evangelical Ritualization of Death: Abigail Hutchinson’s Conversion in “A Faithful Narrative,” Jonathan Edwards Studies 6, no. 2 (2016): 120–134. 47 WJE 4:194.

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longer the object of her will, and, consequently, her mind ceased to be determined by the perception of pleasure or pain. Her thinking concentrated on Being in general, rather than merely her own suffering self. “She willed what God willed,” Edwards asserts.48 Proving her capacity to recognize pain as only an inclination of the will—as a condition either to choose or decline based on her own process of mental selection—she was able to say under “extreme sufferings” that it was “sweet” and “comfortable” to “think of heavenly things.”49 In contemplating truth, wisdom, goodness, and other “heavenly” ideas, she experienced “more grace, and greater discoveries of God and Christ, than the present frail state did well consist with,” Edwards recounts.50 She sensed “exceeding sweetness” in the face of suffering, “find[ing] herself disposed to say these words: ‘I am quite willing to live, and quite willing to die; quite willing to be sick, and quite willing to be well…I felt myself perfectly easy, in full submission to the will of God.’”51 She does not, to use Locke’s phrase, go “blindfolded into [pain’s] embraces,” as those in a natural condition were inclined to do, but wills only ideas that emanate from God.52 As her sense of self diminished, she experienced “the mind’s pleasure” and recognized “the sensible knowledge of beauty” that Sang Hyun Lee describes. It is important to recognize that her agreement with God’s will was a choice—a judgment executed by the faculties of a rational mind and made at a point when such a choice should not, according to prevailing theories of sense perception, be possible. It is in this respect, according to Edwards’s definition, that she achieved “spiritual” status. Her new posture of mind was marked not only by her disinclination to pain, but also by the appearance of spiritual consciousness not conditioned on ideas forged in the world. “O…How good it is! How sweet and comfortable it is to consider, and think of heavenly things,” she exclaimed to her sister shortly before her death.53 Edwards’s proposal from Religious Affections that grace arrives through supernatural means, by a modality different from “what is natural, and from everything that natural men experience, in degree and circumstances” was fulfilled in Hutchinson’s act of thinking ideas that correspond to the divine mind.54 By focusing thinking on heavenly things during severe pain, and by experiencing sweetness as a result, she demonstrated a capacity to exercise her will in way that was not consistent with ordinary notions of human understanding. Typically, pain would encourage thoughts to fix upon both the immediacy of pain 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

WJE 4:198. WJE 4:197. WJE 4:199. WJE 4:196. Locke, Essay, 253. WJE 4:197. WJE 2:205.

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and the inevitability of future pain—a mental state Locke calls “uneasiness,” and which we might read as synonymous with Edwards’s “dark side” of affliction. The human fear of pain is so profound, Locke argues, that “a little of it extinguishes all our pleasures,” that “we desire to be rid of the present evil…because under the present pain we find not ourselves capable of the least degree of happiness….And therefore our whole endeavors and thoughts are intent to get rid of the present evil.”55 Hutchinson’s affections challenge Locke’s theory on two counts. First, she did not seek to eliminate pain but, instead, willingly abided it. Second, she was able both to think thoughts not related to pain while she suffered and to feel happiness when it should have been impossible. In fact, Hutchinson’s pain remained severe until her death, but the point Edwards aims to make is that pain did not cause her to withdraw into herself, to reflect on or to defend her own body and life. In “The Mind,” Edwards remarks that “the mind feels when it thinks,” which implies that as it thinks without reference to pain, it by necessity perceives only pleasure. Hutchinson’s judgement to be either sick or well, to be either in pain or not, and even to live or die disrupts Locke’s notion that the mind habitually concerns itself with maintaining homeostasis and preserving the human organism. Edwards considered the moral imperatives ascribed to such a spiritual life in his final work, The Nature of True Virtue. There are two associated ways in which a virtuous mind, like Hutchinson’s, expresses its “highest excellency” and testifies to the “glory of God.” In its “agreeable[ness] to the mind of the creator,” the spiritual mind demonstrates virtue.56 Yet in this posture, the mind only partially fulfills the end for which it was created and for which it has converted. In order to use the grace acquired in conversion, the saint was thus compelled to adopt an ethical stance toward other “created understandings,” to engage in benevolence toward other people, in order to enact love to God.57 The regenerate mind is uniquely conditioned to seek and find the good in other created beings. Part of the effect of disregarding pain and willing only what God wills is that the spiritual mind disregards pain not only in itself—in its own sickness, deformity, or solitariness—but it also ceases to perceive pain in others. It inclines only to the good, and not to the “evil,” in created beings. To Edwards, such a “propensity of mind to Being in general, which appears chiefly in such exercises, is virtue, truly so called; or in other words, true grace.”58 In an illuminating passage in his account of Hutchinson, Edwards reveals that Hutchinson demonstrated this sort of benevolence near the end of her life. Amidst her pain, she “often expressed an 55 56 57 58

Locke, Essay, 252. WJEO 8:559. WJEO 8:559. WJEO 8:559.

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exceeding compassion and pitiful love, which she found in her heart towards persons in a Christless condition.”59 Her concern that other created beings might be capable of expressing love to God in a manner similar to her own demonstrates the state of true virtue and grace that characterized her mind. She revealed no concern for self, even at the height of illness and pain.

12.5 Pain and Formations of Self John Locke had advanced narrowly materialist formulation of “self” by way of the understanding’s comprehension of pleasure and pain: “Self is that conscious thinking thing…which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends,” he offered.60 On his account, self consisted in concernment over pleasure and pain, and it followed that ethical decision making happened as the mind judged the degree to which the self would meet with pain, either directly (by contact with a stimulus) or causally (by juridical penalty, for instance).61 It is precisely this concern for self-preservation that Abigail Hutchinson’s conversion betrays. Countering Locke, Edwards uses her example to show that ethical persons are not motivated strictly out of self-interest, as Locke would have it. Rather, on Edwards’s account, Hutchinson proves that to think ideas not derived from sense perception is to enact moral being. The path to becoming spiritual and, by extension, moral was quite simple: it required a new commitment to thinking ideas not associated with natural pains or pleasures. If pain did not insinuate itself into consciousness as an idea, then the mind was compelled to consider neither it nor its temporal causes. Here again Edwards modified Locke’s theory to suit his own metaphysical ends. Locke had said that thinking occurs when the mind “turns its view inwards upon itself.”62 As those ideas formed by sense perception were ordered in the mind—whether by immediate impression or 59 WJE 4:196. 60 Locke, Essay, 307. 61 Gideon Yaffe refers to this Lockean sense of self as a “susceptibility-to-pain theory” of consciousness. He observes, “A creature that is conscious is necessarily susceptible to pleasure and pain, and, conversely, a creature that feels pain is necessarily conscious. Consciousness is the awareness that attends pleasure and pain and that does so with necessity.” In this model, consciousness emerges for Locke because pleasure and pain provoke the mind into a state of awareness, and they structure consciousness by enabling a “special kind of concern that we have with past actions that we take ourselves to have performed,” writes Yaffe. Gideon Yaffe, “Locke on Ideas of Identity and Diversity,” The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Lex Newman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 224–225. 62 Locke, Essay, 213.

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memory recall—the mind would think and create consciousness. Locke’s view of pain therefore suggested that through reflection, consciousness could itself become fixed in a state of evil. Yet in Edwards’s conception, the mind could experience pain without being defined by it. If, as Edwards sees it, pain does not exist in consciousness and lacks the power to force the mind into action, then all objects and ideas pain references are necessarily eliminated from the mind. Such a mind is recreated, then, by thinking only things associated with the good and the beautiful. By extension, if “self” is conceived at the most basic level through the perception of pain and the reflexive movement away from it, then a self no longer constituted by pain might no longer be a self—or, at the very least, a very different sort of self would emerge, absent pain. As he suggests that Hutchinson is not defined by understanding that is routinely determined by the “happiness and misery…for which everyone is concerned for himself,” as Locke had put it, Edwards exploits a lacuna in Locke’s conception of identity.63 Locke’s theory of the self was complex, and scholars agree that the Essay poses more questions about personhood than it answers. But it was the case that Locke defined “self,” in large part, as sameness of consciousness through time, where one’s identity took form as past instances of sense perception were brought to bear on the present and future. The scenario Hutchinson found herself in was quite different from this: she recalled the past, and her mind remained conscious of her body throughout her sickness, but she did not attribute her new, spiritual identity to any past formation of consciousness or to any one moment of sense perception. Attuned to memory, but unmoved by feeling, Hutchinson’s sense of self had, in a technical way, dissolved. As Hutchinson’s conversion demonstrates, Edwardsean spiritual identity consists in the attraction to Being in general—or, more specifically, from an attraction to all “specific loves to a love of all being,” as Perry Miller writes, and not in an attraction to one’s own personhood.64 Echoing Miller, Paul Helm suggests that because God is the being from whom all moral truth and knowledge issue, “I,” for Edwards, is defined by its relationship to God’s being through time and not according to created being. “What ‘I’ refers to when used in the present tense,” Helm writes, “is a momentary self.”65 Personality is thus a fleeting concept after one’s spiritual conversion because it is defined only by disinterested love to all being. The mind is conscious of being, but not of self—not of chronological memory or of past ideas that are brought into the present moment. The conversionary turn away from a natural condition and toward a spiritual one occurs 63 Locke, Essay, 308. 64 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 243. 65 Paul Helm, “A Forensic Dilemma: Locke and Edwards on Personal Identity,” in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, ed. Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 56.

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when, as Miller suggests, “out of selfishness arises a disinterested benevolence that adores the order in which the self is one without reference to that self ’s particular pleasures—or pains.”66 Spiritual man does not stop recognizing himself as flesh and blood existing in time and space, in God’s created order. Rather, such a person stops making choices that are premised on pain and pleasure. Edwards proposes that identity is no longer stable when pain ceases to regulate the exercises of the will—when a new, inward sense is perceived and distracts the will from its ordinary preoccupations with the body. The new sense in the mind arrives when the will serves the end for which it was created: namely, love to God.

12.6 David Brainerd’s “Inward Pleasing Pain” About Hutchinson’s life and death, Edwards writes surprisingly little—only that “she had long been infirm, and often had been exercised with great pain; but she died chiefly of famine.”67 Her story is largely without context, and though it serves as an important emblem of conversion, because of her untimely death, it is not a practical example of religious awakening. Edwards would later offer another, more dynamic model of sainthood in the evangelist David Brainerd, who had proselytized among Native American tribes in the mid-Atlantic colonies in the1740s. If Hutchinson’s experience as a “disinterested” self lasted for only a week, Brainerd’s lasted for several years. The account of Brainerd’s spiritual life found in Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd is long and exhaustive, and I will consider here just the connections Edwards draws between pain and the self in the text. Curiously, though Brainerd spend many years ministering to Indians, the Life remains more concerned with Brainerd’s perception of his own redemption than with the religious awakening of indigenous populations. As Laura Stevens observes, “The text pays less attention to the Indians…than it does to Brainerd’s spiritual struggles.”68 If Brainerd focused less on Indian conversion than the reader might expect, he went to great lengths describing his working conditions. His proselytizing regularly led him to spend days at a time traveling through the wilderness, where he was “frequently…exposed [to the elements], and [had] sometimes lain out the whole night.”69 Such “seasons of difficulty” caused physical pain, but the pain of this exposure only underscores the spuri66 Miller, Edwards, 243. 67 WJE 4:198. 68 Laura Stevens, The Poor Indian: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 143. 69 An Account of the Life of the Reverend Mr. David Brainerd, in WJE 7, ed. Norman Pettit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 274.

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ousness of the repentant relying on temporal comfort and further reveals the futility in seeking objects or other people for worldly survival.70 It effectively did not matter to Brainerd that his life was in jeopardy; he did not act to alleviate the pains found in the wilderness by seeking better lodging or abandoning his difficult work, for example. Edwards sees Brainerd’s privation as the apotheosis of self-denial. He explains that Brainerd testified to his faithful disposition as he “openly and actually forsook the world, with its possessions, delights, and common comforts, to dwell as it were with wild beasts in a howling wilderness…with a constant cheerfulness.”71 Brainerd’s cheer during moments of pain testified to a life premised on principles of radical self-denial, yet in his account, even a desire for death was a forbidden act of the will, since it epitomized concern for the self.72 To this end, Edwards reflects that Brainerd was a study in what it means to be “emptied of the self.” He makes clear that the self can only be invalidated when self-love is forestalled, when the mind no longer responds to the body’s sensations gathered in the tormenting wilderness, for instance. Without equivocation, he states that Brainerd’s “first experience of the sanctifying and comforting power of God’s spirit did not begin in some bodily sensation.”73 Brainerd’s conversion and the sanctified life he led thereafter were characterized by the apparent absence of external feeling—or at least by the absence of physiological response to sensation. By not reacting to pain, he demonstrates a form of thinking that was outside of ordinary human sentience and emotion. The wilderness, however, was not Brainerd’s only foe, for he died in October of 1747 from chronic lung disease. Before his death—a death that was, by all accounts, persistently painful—he remarked, “I care not what I part with to be forever with the Lord” and intimated, “My work is done; I have done with all my friends: All the world is nothing to me.” The next day, “He often repeated the word ‘eternity,’” Edwards reports.74 Brainerd was reluctant in his diary to express either love or hatred for the world and its people, since to do so would reveal a mind penetrated by the carnal and sensual feelings of pleasure and pain that such created things cause. His “disinterest” appears, at times, as something like indifference, yet in distancing himself from the world, he is demonstrating love in the highest form.75 The repetition of “eternity,” the condition of being associated 70 71 72 73 74 75

WJE 7:274. WJE 7:512. WJE 7:275. WJE 7:503. WJE 7:549. Branka Arsic´ has argued that for Edwards, “individual being becomes ethical…by progressively eroding the boundaries of its ‘individuality,’ of its personal mind.” She writes, “While man’s personal consciousness can’t possibly become identical to God’s, man can

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with God, perpetuates his holy habit of mind by thinking an idea associated with moral good, supplanting and redirecting thoughts of persons and things. As it thinks eternity, his mind feels eternity, according to the logic Edwards laid out in “The Mind.” Joseph Conforti has observed that in this frame, Brainerd became the “personification of radical disinterested benevolence.”76 He was, in a very technical Edwardsean sense, a selfless person. He inhabited a material body and remained conscious of his own thinking, but he did not recognize pain and pleasure, or “natural” good and evil, as constituents of consciousness. “Counting pain and distress and every bodily infirmity as dross, he patiently encountered difficulties and dangers,” Conforti writes.77 Still, regarding pain as a kind of sensorial detritus is not exactly equivalent to the sheer absence of pain—for Brainerd, like Hutchinson, indeed felt pain. In fact, much of his adult life was exceedingly painful, though his actions and his sense of identity were not founded on suffering. Even if one feels but does not think about pain, there remains the problem of talking about pain, and in this respect, Brainerd demanded a new language of pain, in order to give voice to the unusual selflessness he enacted. The sort of persons Edwards reveals in Hutchinson and Brainerd are “new” not just because they are spiritual and enact holy and ethical lives by inclining away from pain and toward Being in general, but also because they create new modes of perceiving, thinking, and, by consequence, speaking. Hutchinson had tried out a new, apparently paradoxical language of pain before her death, suggesting, as she testified, that God could make death “easy in great pain.”78 But Brainerd lived for several years in a painful, dying state. In order to testify to his spiritual life and to record his clerical work in Native Americans communities, he wrote extensively about pleasure in the face of pain. Something called “pleasing pain,” as he terms it, emerges in the context of inner reflection, and it became a means to ascribe his uneasiness to a longing for God, rather than attributing it to himself. “I felt inward pleasing pain, that I could not be conformed to God entirely, fully and forever,” he wrote in late September of 1742.79 A month later, he recorded that “God has been pleased to keep my soul hungry…so

76 77 78 79

nevertheless increase his excellency and virtue by striving to become like God…by striving to communicate back to ‘being in general’ the infusion of infinite love he has received from being.” Arsic´ illuminates the degree to which a person like Brainerd operated without self and enacted a kind of disembodied love, or “infinite general love,” as Edwards calls it in “The Mind” (WJE 6:365). Branka Arsic´, “Introduction,” in American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron, ed. Branka Arsic´ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5–6. Joseph Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 76. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, 75. WJE 4:198. WJE 7:183.

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that I have been filled with a kind of a pleasing pain,” and exclaimed, “Oh, this pleasing pain! It makes my soul press after God.”80 The pain produced by the intersubjective limits between God and man encloses other, terrestrial modes of pain and suffering, substituting for all forms of hardship and permitting Brainerd to acknowledge—but not dwell in—those temporal trials that existed outside of his desire for God. Pain does not disappear for the spiritual man. Rather, expressions of pain become part of the expression of love to God, which Brainerd, like Hutchinson, recognizes as a feeling that God alone can assuage. Brainerd’s “pleasing pain” provides a way to talk about pain—even severe kinds of pain— while marginalizing self and enacting disinterested benevolence. From Edwards’s perspective, Brainerd’s life was beautiful. He writes in the Appendix to the Life, “It appears plainly and abundantly all along…that that beauty, that sort of good, which was the great object of the new sense of his mind, the new relish and appetite given to him in conversion, and thenceforward maintained and increased in his heart, was holiness, conformity to God, living to God…He knew no true excellency of happiness but this.”81 Edwards’s homage to Brainerd’s faith is, in a way, ironic—for Brainerd was melancholic for many years while he worked as a missionary; his life was not objectively “happy.” But this is precisely the point Brainerd and Edwards each try to make in the text: happiness is not a worldly passion in the saint but an aesthetic condition that yields spiritual being. His melancholy he attributes only to his longing for God, and not to a nomadic and sickly life. Simply in thinking of Being in general, he felt—or better, sensed—freedom from his material existence. By considering the lives and deaths of Hutchinson and Brainerd, Edwards’s claim about living on the light side of affliction becomes clearer. It is a more rigorous project than simply not dwelling on the damaging parts of life. It necessitates the abandonment of the very self that perceives its own afflictions and the creation of a new, conscious being that perceives only spiritual harmony.

80 WJE 7:186. 81 WJE 7:506.

Amelia Marini (Cuesta College)

Seeing Happiness Jonathan Edwards and the Art of Perception

13.1 Introduction In an early writing, now referred to as “The Spider Letter,” Jonathan Edwards produced a series of observations about spiders and the mechanics of their webmaking. The task he had set for himself was to understand how spiders could stretch their webs between the branches of trees, some at quite a distance from one another. How is it, the amateur naturalist wondered, that insects “wholly destitute of wings” could spin their webs from branch to branch, “marching in the air from one tree to another, sometimes at the distance of five or six rods”? Edwards found that spiders move on the breeze, lifted by their own silken strands —and that they seemed to him to do so with great joy. “But that which is most astonishing,” he writes, “is that very often there appears at the end of these webs, spiders sailing in the air with them, doubtless with abundance of pleasure, though not with so much as I have beheld them and shewed them to others. And since I have seen these things I have been very conversant with spiders.”1 There is, perhaps, no image more connected with Jonathan Edwards than that of the spider. However, it is regrettable that Edwards should be remembered more clearly for the condemned spider of the often anthologized “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” than he is for the happily-sailing spiders of “The Spider Letter.” Though Edwards’s appointment to the pulpit at Northampton did mark a resolute return to a Calvinism with higher stakes and more severe consequences —one which brought into clear relief what William James would later call “the fact of ‘no’”—the broader scope of his thinking is better characterized by his searching meditations on the nature of divine order, beauty, goodness, harmony,

1 WJE 6:163.

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and happiness.2 As the novelist Marilynne Robinson writes in a recent piece for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, “[Puritans] are supposed to have frowned upon the joys of life, to have had a special, dark obsession with sexuality, to have hated all things beautiful. None of this is true.”3 It is especially untrue of Jonathan Edwards. Happiness—the subject of this essay—has been overlooked as one of the most foundational concepts in his thinking, as evidenced in part by the sheer number of instances in which the word appears in his collected work: upwards of 5,000 times. Furthermore, “Seeing happiness,” Edwards writes, “is the highest end of the creation of the universe.”4 In this essay, I rethink the temperament of Edwards’s thought by attending to the exalted role that happiness plays in his writings. As William James writes in the Varieties of Religious Experience, “This sense of the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our particular temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, ‘What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?’ It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way.”5 If we are to understand Edwards’s philosophical and religious mind, we must be attuned to the temperamental melody of his thought, in which happiness plays an important—and often neglected—role. In order to do that, it will be necessary to sketch a context for Edwards’s development of the term. Edwards not only read extensively about happiness in classical writings and reformation theology, but he also encountered the concept in the emerging Enlightenment philosophy of his moment. In one sense, Edwards’s interest in happiness seems to situate him squarely as a man of his time. And yet, the deeper one traces the word through his writings, the clearer it becomes that the way in which Edwards uses the word is unusual, representing neither the deferred Christian ideal to be realized after death, nor the new social and political happiness promised by eighteenth-century material advancements. Instead, this essay will propose that happiness emerges in Edwards’s work as a state of aesthetic reception—the fruit of “seeing” objects and events as aligned with divine purpose. “Happiness, strictly, consists in the perception of these three things,” Edwards writes. “Of the consent of being to its own being; of its own 2 James, Writings 1902–1910, 617. “May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not religious optimism be too idyllic? Must all be saved? Is no price paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all ‘yes, yes’ in the universe? Doesn’t the fact of ‘no’ stand at the very core of life?” 3 Robinson, Harvard Divinity Bulletin. 4 WJE, 13:200. 5 James, Writings 1902–1910, 39.

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consent to being; and of being’s consent to being.”6 While “the aesthetic” can be defined in many ways, Edwards’s writings on happiness resonate most deeply with the idea of aesthetic experience, as it would later be elaborated by the American philosopher John Dewey—experience in which the relationship between matter, or being, for Edwards—was perceived in its many moving relations to itself and to the greater whole.7 Though specific markers of aesthetic experience will be discussed more deeply in the following pages, it will suffice for now to say that Edwards believed that in the written word, in nature, in history, and among fellow human beings, one could always find the connection between the things of this earth and the things of the spirit if one could see rightly. To be made happy was to read the cosmos as an enormous, splendid text—one in which God continually revealed himself, his will, and his beauty to human beings. Though I’m indebted to a vast array of wonderful historical and theological scholarship on Edwards, my own readings engage his work primarily on the level of language, and the way that language shapes experience. In these readings, I’ve relied heavily upon the writings of American pragmatist thinkers—particularly those of William James and John Dewey, who—as scholars like Joan Richardson have argued—inherited and built upon Edwards’ philosophical insights. I have found that the pragmatist emphasis upon “the fact of feeling” has been most useful for thinking about why the mood, tone, and aesthetic qualities of religious experience matter.8 To put it another way—the pragmatists ask us to imagine what difference it might make to remember that before there was ever a spider dangling over the infernal flames, there were others who sailed happily on the breeze.

13.2 Happiness as Aesthetic Experience “If,” asks James, “we were to ask the question: ‘What is human life’s chief concern?’ one of the answers we should receive would be: ‘It is happiness.’ How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times 6 WJE 6:338. 7 Though there remains much work to be done on the connections between the philosophical resonances between Jonathan Edwards and the early 20th century American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, notable treatments of the subject have been undertaken by Bruce Kuklick in Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale, 1985) and especially by Joan Richardson in her two books A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge, 2006), and Pragmatism and American Experience (Cambridge, 2014). 8 In this instance, “the fact of feeling” refers to a line from Wallace Steven’s “Adagia” and is an idea developed extensively by Richardson in her work.

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the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”9 Though James poses this question at the beginning of his lecture on the religion of “Healthy-Mindedness,” and, while no religious experience could be less of the healthy-minded variety than Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinism, James’s point must stand at the beginning of our inquiry. It would be impossible to enter into a discussion of happiness in Edwards’s writings without acknowledging that his interest in the concept—far from setting him apart—ties him to several lines of religious, philosophical, and social thought. As James underlines, happiness is our perennial human concern. Thus, if there is something unique about Edwards’s conception of happiness —as I believe there is—we will need to isolate these original threads from those he inherited from his predecessors, and from those of his contemporary moment. As nearly all of Edwards’s commentators from Perry Miller on have pointed out, Edwards’s mind was singularly gifted at synthesizing new information with older patterns of belief—and, thanks to the gift of hundreds of volumes secured for Yale College by Thomas Dummer in 1718, he had access to a prodigious library of both ancient and modern thinkers. Keeping this in mind, our vision of Edwards’s happiness will sharpen if we’re able to distinguish how much of Edwards’s understanding of happiness can be attributed to the burgeoning Enlightenment philosophy, how much we can trace to classical sources, and whether, finally, we might find new formulations, those observations and expressions uniquely informed by his own religious experiences—his personal perceptions of divinely inspired happiness.10 In order to move us quickly into the heart of the discussion, it will suffice to consider two representative influences, both ancient and modern, on Edwards’s development of the idea of happiness: Augustine of Hippo and John Locke. No one will be surprised to hear Edwards mentioned in tandem with either of these figures, and certainly much work has been done already to elucidate the connections.11 However, despite a number of authoritative accounts on Edwards’s sense of theology, language, history, and science in the light of Augustine and Locke, comparatively little has been written about happiness—a concept both 9 James, Writings 1902–1910, 77. 10 However, an exhaustive history of happiness from the Greeks to the eighteenth-century as it relates to and shaped Edwards notions of happiness is an undertaking too immense for these pages. Though it is without reference to Jonathan Edwards, Darrin McMahon’s Happiness: A History offers an informative and moderately concise overview of happiness as it developed from a virtue to a feeling in western thought. 11 For more on Edwards and Locke, see the supplementary essays in WJE 6; Miller’s biography of Edwards, Jonathan Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1981), and Joan Richardson’s chapter on Edwards in A Natural History of Pragmatism. For more on Edwards and Augustine, see Sang Hyun Lee’s insights on Edwards’s engagement with and modification of the Augustinian tradition in The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards.

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thinkers developed extensively and whose variations Edwards would have internalized in his deep readings of their works. More importantly, the influences of Augustine and Locke would have been notably at odds; these two thinkers offer fundamentally different understandings of what it means to be happy. As Darrin McMahon notes, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment marks a fundamental break in the meaning of the word happiness. Both classical and early Christian models tended to position happiness as beyond the scope of mortal experience. In the Aristotelian tradition, happiness was conferred on a life lived fully and according to reason, once one was free from the forces of chance. The Athenian poet Solon famously illustrates this idea with the aphorism, “Call no man happy until he is dead.” Likewise, early Christians like Augustine incorporated classical Platonism into Christian theology in their belief that happiness was a state of harmonious being that could not be fully realized until the body was reunited with Christ after death.12 In many respects, Augustine’s influence upon Edwards feels far more intuitive than that of Locke. In The New England Mind (1939), Miller dedicates an entire chapter to the passion of “Augustinian piety” and the way in which it “blazed… fiercely” in figures like Edwards.13 While it’s true that Edwards’s Calvinism borrowed much from the deep affections of the Augustinian tradition, especially in his ecstatic descriptions of grace, and the way in which he understood the physical world as a “shadow” of a spiritual one, he was also undeniably a man of the emerging sciences—an Enlightenment thinker.14 His world was shaped as radically by the discoveries of Locke and Newton, as it was by early Christian and reformation theology. As Caroline Winterer suggests in her work on the role of happiness in the American Enlightenment, “People who thought themselves enlightened were acutely self-conscious of their era and their own self-imposed duty to promote the improvement of future ages. What good was the enlightenment of the eighteenth-century… if it did not help us see and adopt everything the genius of man had invented for the happiness of humanity?”15 Though, as I will discuss, there is much in this ideology of progress that runs directly counter 12 McMahon, Happiness: A History, 1–7. See also Margaret Mile’s wonderful essay on Augustine in In Pursuit of Happiness, 47–48. 13 Miller, The New England Mind, 5–8. “The Augustinian strain of piety flows form man’s desire to transcend his imperfect self, to open channels for the influx of an energy which pervades the world, but with which he himself is inadequately supplied. It takes flight from the realization that the natural man, standing alone in the universe, is not only minute and insignificant, but completely out of touch with both justice and beauty. It cries out for forgiveness of the sins by which he has cut himself off from full and joyous participation. It proceeds upon the indomitable convictions that man, a part of created being, must once have been happy, though now he is everywhere miserable.” 14 James, Writings 1902–1910, 127. 15 Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, 2.

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to particular aspects of Edwards’s Calvinism, we must understand that no eighteenth century thinker would have been able to avoid the rhetoric of happiness. Though Edwards did not live to hear the fullest rhetorical incarnations explode into the language of revolution, he would certainly have felt early intimations of this thought-current. A crucial sign of the times, happiness was more than “one of the principle quests of enlightened people”; it was the obsession of an era.16 Though Miller perhaps overstates the singularity of importance that Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding bore on Edwards’s thought, the impact was immense. In the Essay, Locke melds the “new psychology” of sensation with revolutionary social thought built upon concepts of reason, liberty and happiness. He writes: [Happiness] is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain: and the lowest degree of what can be called happiness, is so much ease from all pain, and so much present pleasure, as without which any cannot be content. Now because pleasure and pain are produced in us, by the operation of certain objects, either on our minds or our bodies; and in different degrees: therefore what has an aptness to produce pleasure in us, is that we call good, and what is apt to produce pain in us, we call evil, for no other reason, but for its aptness to produce pleasure and pain in us, wherein consists our happiness and misery.17

As McMahon notes, this “coupling” of “good feeling with the good” was “monumental”—an essential break with a tradition in Christian thought, which acknowledged, and even emphasized, the relation between earthly suffering and spiritual good.18 Here, Locke’s concept of happiness hangs upon our ability to determine whether a particular variety of happiness is worth pursuing as “true” happiness. “As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature, lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, there we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty,” Locke writes. For Locke, individuals must be able to suspend their desires for illusory happiness “till we have duly examined, whether it has a tendency to, or be inconsistent with our real happiness.”19 As Locke notes, the suspension of desire is essential to human liberty, which—if we are not to be enslaved to the destructive whims of the passing moment—must be upheld by the reason-informed will. In terms of Locke’s influence upon Edwards, there is a great deal in Edwards’s discussion of happiness and virtue—especially in the two late dissertations, The 16 17 18 19

Ibid., 3. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 104. McMahon, “From the Happiness of Virtue to the Virtue of Happiness”, 14. Locke, 108.

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End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue, which echo bits of Locke’s Essay. However, the fundamental difference between the two, as illustrated in the above passages, is that Locke believed that human beings had the capacity to determine true happiness through the use of reason, while Edwards believed that any conception of real happiness could only be the result of grace, which bestows a “new sense of things” on the individual. Locke believed in the governance of desire, whereas Edwards understood that desire couldn’t be governed; in order to move us toward what is good, our desire must be reoriented by a force larger than the human will. And so, it is between the systems of Augustine and Locke that Edwards devised his own. Like Locke, Edwards believed that human beings could know at least a degree of true happiness experientially and in the embodied present, but he also understood that it would not depend upon reason, individual will, or an individual’s own capacity to distinguish the good and the true. Like Augustine, Edwards espoused a vision of ultimate happiness that depended upon the nearness of the individual heart to the divine as a kind of spiritual attunement, but otherwise found the Augustinian tradition to be too Platonic, too absolute, and fixed in its conception of the relationship of earthly and spiritual things. Augustine put real, divine happiness at too far a remove from sensory experience. In consequence, Edwards imagined an alternative happiness—one that depended upon Augustinian grace and embodied, sensorial experience. Because I’m interested in examining Edwards’s happiness as an aesthetic experience, most of this essay will focus upon the embodied, sensorial nature of happiness by exploring the way in which a particular human practice of receptivity and responsiveness is necessary to sustain and deepen religious experience. However, we crucially misunderstand Edwards’s conception of happiness if we don’t acknowledge that within his thinking, all human practice, activity, intent, and response is wholly subordinate and dependent upon the other component: a divine intervention into human hearts that Edwards calls grace —“a new sense of things.” Edwards describes grace as “a new inward perception or sensation of their minds, entirely different in its nature and kind, from anything that ever their minds were the subjects of before they were sanctified.”20 He understood grace as bestowing upon human beings a faculty for perceiving divine goodness that is every bit as transformative as the way the sensation of taste changes our experience of the food we eat. Grace allows for human beings to perceive new spiritual relations between objects, people, events, and natural occurrences, that were previously meaningless in their isolation. However, while grace is primary and immediate, there must also be an embodied response to grace, which is of far more importance to our discussion of 20 WJE 2:205.

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happiness. By embodied experience I mean the way in which a mortal person perceives, responds to, and lives with an experience of grace. Though grace gives one the capacity to sense spiritual relations, this is much the same as suggesting that eyes provide the ability to see physical objects. Grace may make spiritual understanding possible, but this understanding is deepened by human participation in the cultivation and practice of particular habits of the spiritual life. Just as we must train ourselves to “see” objects by cultivating an understanding of distance, size, and relation, so the moment of justification, or grace, is deepened by the daily practices, rituals, and habits that help one to live a life in accordance with grace—what Calvinists call the process of sanctification. While justification is immediate and complete, sanctification is imperfect and ongoing. It’s easy to overlook this embodied, imperfect practice in Edwards’s work especially because in the recorded experiences of his youth, encounters with God-in-nature had an almost mystical quality of spontaneity and ease about them. However, it’s important to appreciate that this “reading” of the spiritual into the natural did not always come fluidly. In fact, the training of the mind to recognize spiritual harmonies might more accurately be considered a spiritual discipline dependent upon prayer, meditation and biblical study—a discipline that eventually rewarded him with uniquely vivid insights. Ultimately, this is to suggest that Edwards’s concept of happiness originates in grace but ripens in experience. The development of his ability to read the divine palimpsest—to perceive the text in the world, and the world in the text, was not automatic—but cultivated by incorporating textual, intellectual, sensory, and emotional experience into one greater meaning: into an aesthetic experience. But what is meant by the aesthetic? As I’ve mentioned, the best understanding of the term is in in the tradition of John Dewey’s writings, particularly Art as Experience, in which Dewey describes aesthetic experience as the unity of intellectual acuity, emotional engagement, and the material world in order to express some end, or to receive an end being expressed.21 Dewey’s vision of the aesthetic, as opposed to other definitions that pertain primarily to surfaces or to “beauty,” renders the aesthetic with all the dynamism of any natural process. It involves both doing and undergoing—periods of action and periods of reflection. It is punctuated by moments of struggle and moments of ease. It takes time, and develops in complexity. It is not just limited to the increasingly rarified world of artists and art objects, but extends to anything in the realm of human experience that can meet these criteria. Any object becomes “art” when materials have been transformed intentionally in the hands of a thoughtful maker engaged at all levels in his making. An experience becomes aesthetic when a viewer uses

21 Dewey, Art As Experience, 17–19.

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the wide spectrum of her interior resources to sensitively perceive the object at hand, and in turn uses those perceptions to transform the object’s meaning. Though it may seem anachronistic to use a secular twentieth-century tract on aesthetics to examine Puritan experience, Dewey’s understanding of the role of the aesthetic in human life was deeply aligned with the way Edwards describes grace: both experiences culminate in an engagement that gives life meaning, a way of integrating disjointed parts into a splendid whole, and a way of existing more fully day-to-day among the materials of ordinary experience.22 Additionally, Dewey’s understanding of the aesthetic is more deeply aligned with the puritan experience of aesthetics than other less holistic models. As Miller suggests, the Puritan “was not insensible to beauty or sublimity, but in the face of every experience he was obliged to ask himself, What does this signify?”23 Though Calvinist theology could not defend beauty for the sake of ornamentation, it made room for earthly beauty as a tool for approaching spiritual beauty. This is to say that the aesthetic was never an end in itself; it always served as a connector between this world and a spiritual one. It needed to teach, to illustrate, to guide the vision from the partial toward the whole. Though Dewey’s formulation of the aesthetic is not explicitly religious, he too embraced the notion that the aesthetic was useful and connective, and was skeptical of it as a self-contained system, what would later be called “art-for-art’s sake.” “Art,” Dewey writes, “is a quality that permeates an experience; it is not, save by a figure of speech, the experience itself. Esthetic experience is always more than esthetic. In it a body of matters and meanings, not in themselves esthetic, become esthetic as they enter into an ordered rhythmic movement toward consummation. The material itself is widely human.”24 When aesthetic experience is able to saturate what Dewey calls our “normal processes of living,” we radically alter what was previously a “humdrum… submission to convention” by cultivating a heightened sense of agency, meaning, and ultimately—“delight.”25 In Edwards’s words, to encounter the world with “a new sense.”26 22 But is Dewey’s work truly secular? Though Dewey’s work espouses no particular creed, there is much within Art as Experience to suggest that aesthetic experience is deeply entwined with the way we encounter the sacred. 23 Miller, Images and Shadows of Divine Things, 4. 24 Dewey, Art as Experience, 339. 25 Dewey, Art as Experience, 9, 42, 19. 26 In Pragmatism and American Experience, Joan Richardson touches on Dewey’s own religious upbringing, and the way in which it informed both his style, which tends—in its plainness— to privilege communication over expression (as Perry Miller suggests of Puritan aesthetics), and in certain metaphors of creation that Dewey uses to elaborate the aesthetic process. Considering that Dewey’s mind emerges from an American Congregationalist soil at least related to that of Edwards’s, it is interesting that Dewey calls aesthetic experience “that delightful perception”, “delight” being one of Edwards’s favored keywords. I do not know to

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And so, if we can agree that Dewey’s holistic and integrated vision of the aesthetic provides a useful framework for exploring Edwards’s writings, I’d like to explore Edwards’s understanding of happiness as an embodied, aesthetic experience along three main criteria that appear in both Edwards’s and Dewey’s writings: communicativeness, intelligence, and expansiveness.

13.3 Happiness is Communicative In Miscellany 332, Edwards records an impression at once simple and seismic: “God is a communicative being.”27 This idea would form the basis of the second of the two dissertations, The Ends for Which God Created in the Earth, in which Edwards formalizes this most important insight about the nature of God. In this text, Edwards writes, “So God looks on the communication of himself, and the emanation of the infinite glory and good that are in himself to belong to the fullness and completeness of himself, as though he were not in his most complete and glorious state without it.”28 Here, God is positioned as being not fully Godself unless that self is communicating its fullness. Essentially, what God is cannot be separated from what God does. In calling God a “a communicative being,” Edwards is suggesting that God is an entity who communicates, and that God’s existence—his being—is inherently communicative. The action is an essence, and the being is a doing. As Sang Hyun Lee suggests, “Edwards departed from the traditional Western metaphysics of substance and form and replaced it with a strikingly modern conception of reality as a dynamic network of dispositional forces and habits.”29 Edwards writes: Thus it appears reasonable to suppose that it was what God had respect to as an ultimate end of his creating the world, to communicate of his own infinite fullness of good; or rather it was his last end, that there might be a glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite fullness of good ad extra, or without himself, and the disposition to communicate himself or diffuse his own fullness, which we must conceive of as being originally in God as a perfection of his nature, was what moved him to create the world.30

In this formulation, the world is positioned as a kind of theater into which the goodness of God displays itself in order to be seen. What Edwards suggests as the dissertation continues, is that the human purpose is primarily receptive: God

27 28 29 30

what extent Dewey would have been familiar with Edwards’s writings—but this is only one of many compelling resonances between the two. WJE 13:410. WJE 8:439. Lee, Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 4. WJE 8:434.

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communicates, and we are intended to receive these communications. Edwards’s typological entries, his scientific writings, and the images in his sermons and notes on scripture all exemplify this desire to be a receiver of divine communication. To cultivate an attuned receptivity to these communications as they occurred in both nature and scripture was the pursuit to which he dedicated his life. For both Edwards and his inheritor, Dewey, the virtue of communication lies in its ability to create connections between the pieces of life that would otherwise be perceived as disjointed and incomplete. “Of all affairs,” Dewey writes in Experience and Nature, “communication is the most wonderful…No person remains the same who shares in situations made possible by communication.”31 Both Edwards and Dewey imagine communication as a means toward an end—as vehicles in their respective teleological systems. For Edwards, God’s communication to human individuals makes “consent,” or the recognition of spiritual relations, possible. At the end of Edwards’s vision, all seemingly disjointed things are eventually reunited in the resurrection. Likewise, Dewey’s teleological vision also moves from the isolated toward the harmonious. For Dewey, the shared experiences enabled by communication culminate in “a life of free and enriching communion” upon which a true realization of Democracy depends.32 Again, while it would be easy to point toward Dewey’s model as a “secular” parallel to Edwards’s, that classification underestimates the depths of Dewey’s project. Just as his understanding of the aesthetic seeks to think outside of sacred/secular dualism, his model for Democracy is holistic—perhaps even reuniting the earthly and spiritual ways in which we “commune.” But what is the relation between communication and the aesthetic? For Dewey, when communication moves from the realm of the perfunctory to that of the aesthetic, it conveys more than information—it conveys experience. “The poetic as distinct from the prosaic, esthetic art as distinct from scientific, expression as distinct from statement, does something different from leading to an experience. It constitutes one… The poem, or painting, does not operate in the dimension of correct descriptive statement but in that of experience itself.”33 This is perhaps another way of suggesting that communication is not aesthetic when its aims and ends are merely cerebral, or centered upon the conveyance of information. In 31 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 204. 32 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184. 33 Dewey, Art as Experience, 89. As many of Dewey’s commentators have pointed out—Dewey’s use of art and aesthetic can be slightly confusing. Though, in this passage, Dewey positions painting and poetry as representing expressions of experience that prose and scientific language do not attain, in other works Dewey discusses science and the novel as art forms. We must keep in mind that, in a Deweyian system, no forms of experience or communication are inherently “aesthetic” or “not aesthetic”—what matters is the state of receptivity and responsiveness of the perceiver.

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addition to having intellectual content, aesthetic communication must prompt a feeling, or emotion.34 No one understood this idea more experientially than Edwards, whose Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections explores the role of feeling in spiritual understanding. As Edwards writes, “Where there is a kind of light without heat, a head stored with notions and speculations, with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light, that knowledge is no true spiritual knowledge of divine things.”35 For Edwards, the goodness of God was not only experienced rationally, but also affectively. And, while divine communication may be experienced as many different emotional states—terror, ecstasy, peacefulness, to name a few—ultimately, these emotions resolve into an abiding experience of happiness. Edwards writes: Now what is glorifying God, but a rejoicing at that glory he has displayed? An understanding of the perfections of God, merely, cannot be the end of the creation; for he had as good not understand it, as see it and not be at all moved with joy at the sight… Wherefore, seeing happiness is the highest end of the creation of the universe, and intelligent beings are that consciousness of the creation that is to be the immediate subject of this happiness, how happy may we conclude will be those intelligent beings that are to be made eternally happy!36

What Edwards envisions is a multi-layered receptivity to the communications of God that can only be described as aesthetic. It’s interesting to note, however, that Edwards describes the “highest end of the creation of the universe” as “seeing happiness”—and not happiness itself. This is not the only time in Edwards’s writing that the act of perceiving, of “seeing,” will be presented as intrinsically linked to his understanding of happiness. When Edwards writes about “seeing happiness” we should understand this phrase as meaning “perceiving order.” The way in which all things “consent” to one another—flowers to bees, roots to soil, child to parent, families to communities— results in the feeling of happiness in the perceiver, experienced as great joy. Within Edward’s lexicon, happiness is a feeling occasioned by understanding oneself as part of an ordered state of being. What we’re seeing, when we see happiness, is presented to us as an infinite array of divinely chosen types and signs: God’s communications mediated through the objects of the world. This is in keeping with Edwards’s conception of God as an artist, one who expresses 34 Dewey, Art as Experience, 43. In this, Dewey is undoubtedly influenced by William James who writes in The Principles of Psychology that, “The trouble with emotions in psychology is that they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things… My theory, on the contrary, is that bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” (352). 35 WJE 2:120. 36 WJE 13:199.

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himself through a chosen medium. Creation is then positioned as a vastly complicated and extraordinarily beautiful text, and human beings as the readers of this text. Hence, Edwards understood that in order to receive God’s communications one must carefully attend to the signs. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this more than his writings collected under the title Images or Shadows of Divine Things— which reads as an exercise in listening for the divine communications of even the most ordinary objects and occurrences. In his encounters with nature, language, and fellow humans, there are no mute elements. Everything in Edwards’s cosmology had some internal truth to communicate. However, this receptivity ought not be mistaken for passivity. When “seeing” becomes a passive activity, it ceases to be part of an aesthetic experience. As John Dewey writes, “[Receptivity] is not passivity. It, too, is a process consisting of a series of responsive acts that accumulate toward objective fulfillment. Otherwise, there is not perception but recognition. The difference between the two is immense.”37 What Dewey suggests is that the process of receiving a work is not wholly unrelated to the process of creating it. Any active reception of a work demands that the viewer participate in the work. To have an experience of it, and not simply an encounter, she will have to think through the relationship between means and ends, parts and wholes, choices made and options discarded exactly as did the maker of the work. “There is an act,” Dewey writes, “of reconstructive doing, and consciousness becomes fresh and alive.”38 Compare this to Edwards’s invocation of “the lively image”—a semantic refrain in Images and Shadows of Divine Things, his most concentrated work on the reception and interpretation of signs. For Edwards, images only truly do their communicative work when they are lively, and liveliness is as much an attribute of the mind that perceives as a quality of the image itself. Because communication relies on having an experience of what we see, the open heart and active intelligence must always be at work, collecting, organizing, interpreting, struggling, and recording its impressions. Not only are we to encounter God’s meaning in the objects, we are to participate in that meaning intellectually. In this way, happiness is not simply bestowed upon an individual; rather, it’s a form of engagement that must be cultivated. One must learn how to be happy.

37 Dewey, Art as Experience, 54. 38 Dewey, Art as Experience, 54.

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13.4 Happiness as Intelligence In the “Miscellanies”, the ethical writings, and in the philosophical writings, Edwards often alludes to the role of the intelligence in spiritual life. Here are examples from the “Miscellanies”, a few of which we have discussed already: The great and universal end of God’s creating the world was to communicate himself. God is a communicative being. This communication is really only to intelligent beings: the communication of himself to their understandings is his glory, and the communication of himself with respect to their wills, the enjoying faculty, is their happiness.39 Wherefore, seeing happiness is the highest end of the creation of the universe, and intelligent beings are that consciousness of the creation that is to be the immediate subject of this happiness, how happy may we conclude will be those intelligent beings that are to be made eternally happy!40 …for intelligent beings are created to be the consciousness of the universe, they may perceive what God is and does. This can be nothing else but to perceive the excellency of what he is and does. Yea, he is nothing but excellency; and all that he does, nothing but excellent.41

I am aware that a discussion of the intellect’s importance to Edwards’s understanding of happiness may seem counter-intuitive; did we not just elaborate the insufficiency of a merely rational receptivity to divine communication? However, within Edwards’s theology, intellect serves feeling in much the same way that Dewey describes science as “the handmaiden” of art.42 Though the religious affections provide a primary indication of divine communication, affections without careful consideration and rigorous examination result in mere religious enthusiasm. While Edwards was clear that reason alone cannot produce a “lively” understanding of spiritual things, he also reverenced complexity, and understood it as having divine value. Take for example this passage from the brief entry on aesthetics, “Beauty of the World”: There are beauties that are more palpable and explicable, and there are hidden and secret beauties. The former pleases and we can tell why: we can explain and particularly point forth agreements that render the things pleasing… The latter sort are those beauties that delight us and we can’t tell why. Thus we find ourselves pleased in beholding the color of violets, but we know not what secret regularity or harmony it is that creates that pleasure in our minds. These hidden beauties are commonly by far the greatest, because the more complex a beauty is, the more hidden it is.43

39 40 41 42 43

WJE 13:410. WJE 13:200. WJE 13:252. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 358. WJE 6:306.

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Within Edwards’s cosmology, God himself is the most infinitely complex of all beauties. He is being’s consent to Being—the interminably complicated harmony that holds all things together. And, though we may seek an encounter with complexity on this scale—in fact, we are all the time surrounded by it—we don’t have the capacity to process it. What we perceive instead, are the simplified echoes of divine beauty—the color of violets, intimating a principle of relation that goes beyond itself. It is the duty of intellect in the service of worship to draw the connection between our sensory perceptions and the divine principle at work. Edwards writes in Miscellany 272, “’Tis only for want of sufficient accurateness, strength and comprehension of mind, that from the motion of any one particular atom we can’t tell all that ever has been, [all] that now is in the whole extent of the creation (as to quantity of matter, figure, bulk and motion, distance), and everything that ever shall be…What room for improvement of reason is there, for angels and glorified minds!”44 Sir Isaac Newton, whom Edwards comes to mention further into “The Beauty of the World,” was one of these glorified minds who, in his theories of color and light, propelled the intellect toward a closer relation with beauty. Edwards understood Newton’s investment in discerning pattern as a form of spiritual revelation, one in which perception was initiated into higher realms of complexity, and in doing so grew nearer to God, which is to say, happier. We can see an example of the importance of uniting intellectual engagement to the affections if we look at Edwards’s writings on thunderstorms in the Personal Narrative and in his scientific writings: And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning. Formerly, nothing had been so terrible to me. I used to be a person uncommonly terrified with thunder: and it used to strike me with terror, when I saw a thunderstorm rising. But now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God at the first appearance of a thunderstorm.45 Thunder. ’Tis remarkable of thunder how long one part of the sound will be heard after another, when ’tis evident that the sound is made all in an instant by the lightning which continues no longer. This arises from the length of the stream of lightning, whereby one part is a great deal further from us than another, so that the sound is longer coming, is a great while coming successively. Hence ’tis that in claps of thunder that are near us, the first noise that we hear seems to be very near the earth, and then it seems to go further and further from and the last will be a murmuring up in the clouds. For although the noise that was made in the clouds and the noise near the earth was made together, as at an instant, yet that in the clouds is much further, and therefore is longer coming, and is a much lower sound when it comes.46 44 WJE 13:375. 45 WJE 16:794. 46 WJE 6:281.

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The former passage, rich with feeling, is striking for the way in which it illustrates a radical reorientation, and for how it returns us to the language of perception, of seeing happiness. I felt God at the first appearance of a thunderstorm.” One must see rightly in order to feel rightly—and seeing rightly is, at least in part, the province of the active intellect. For me, this passage becomes even more dynamic if we pair it with the very different tone of the latter scientific entry. Here, Edwards systematically thinks through why lightning that flashes high above us is accompanied by distant thunder, where as lightning that stretches down to the earth near us is accompanied by a more cacophonous sound. Importantly, instead of diminishing the awesomeness of the thunder, Edwards’s materially based observations enhance his amazement. For Edwards, piecing through the intricacies of God’s communication—in this case through the material attributes of light and sound waves—allows him to bask more fully in the wonder of creation’s complexity. From the perspective of our present moment, the claim that increasing complexity yields increased happiness may seem to turn us from certain truisms regarding happiness and intelligence. Intelligence often seems to run counter to happiness, according to modern markers of contentment, pleasure, satisfaction, and agreement. However, we must remember that Edwards’s happiness was not entirely akin to a modern, secular happiness primarily defined by an absence of conflict or pain. Within his world, the relationship between complexity and happiness was full of complications that often went unresolved. In some ways, these are complications that modern religious believers still live with—those in which a perfect God, concerned with human happiness, “allows” unhappy, seemingly imperfect things to occur. As Perry Miller suggests, the complex goodness of the divine cosmos often required Puritans to exercise great faith— what Miller calls “cosmic optimism”— in a design beyond their comprehension: The indestructible optimism contained within the grim Puritan creed is apparent in the theoretical explanation of affliction. Seeming contradictions between the creator’s goodness and the creation’s visible evils necessitated no denial of either; they merely reinforced the distinction between God’s revealed and secret wills…God frequently causes things to fall out contrary to what seems to us fitting and proper, contrary even to His own uttered word…Reality was as yet unsundered from value, though humanity was unable to perceive the value of all realities.47

A striking feature of Edwards’s happiness is that because we must discipline not only heart but also mind into a synchronicity with its order, the beginnings of happiness can be experienced with discomfort, even great pain. Happiness in this sense goes far beyond our human sense of the cheerful, or the simple designs that

47 Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, 40.

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we think we need in order to live a live devoted to good. Above all, Miller’s “cosmic optimism” was a practice in which American Calvinists engaged deeply in the aesthetic discipline of trying to perceive divine orderliness in situations that might be experienced personally as chaotic, painful or frightening. Dewey, too, noted this discipline as an essential part of aesthetic experience. “The esthetic or undergoing phrase of experience is receptive,” he writes. “It involves surrender. But adequate yielding of the self is possibly only through a controlled activity that may well be intense…When we are only passive to a scene, it overwhelms us and, for lack of answering activity, we do not perceive that which bears us down. We must summon energy and pitch it at a responsive key in order to take in.48 In this case, a profound psychological investment in biblical text acted as that “controlled activity” that allowed American Calvinists to “pitch” their experiences. For Edwards, the cultivation of happiness in an environment not always conducive to it depended upon suspending judgment in immediate circumstances, in order to imagine—within the bounds of what the Bible offered—the role of those circumstances in a more profound context. Happiness might first require the Calvinist congregant to “seek for those perspectives of vision in which evil becomes resolved into the design of the whole, like shadows in a picture.”49 In this idea, we hear echoes of Anne Bradstreet’s poem “Verses upon the Burning of our House” in which grief is allowed scarcely five-lines before it is obliged to resolve into a wider, less partial feeling: “And when I could no longer look/ I blest His name that gave and took/ That laid my goods now in the dust/ Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just.” The concept also intimates future rumblings of what would become Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, in which he describes crossing the bare common, with “a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”50 This fearful gladness, heavy goodness, and quiet joy is the happiness that underlies Edwards’s theology. It is a happiness the complexity of which must be capable of containing disorientation, terror, grief, and anxiety. As Dewey suggests, “As an organism increases in complexity, the rhythms of struggle and consummation in its relation to its environment are varied and prolonged, and they come to include within themselves an endless variety of sub-rhythms. The designs of living are widened and enriched. Fulfillment is more massive and subtly shaded.”51

48 49 50 51

Dewey, Art as Experience, 55. Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, 19. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 10. Dewey, Art as Experience, 23.

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13.5 Happiness and the Expanded Consciousness Ultimately, the experience of happiness—a happiness achieved through receptivity and intellectual responsiveness—becomes aesthetic not only because it unifies the materials of experience, but also because it expands the existence of the good in perception. Therefore, happy are the things that cohere in nature, but happier still is the mind that can register that coherence—that can become continuous with it. For Edwards, “knowledge,” or perception of God’s perfection, is as important an “object” in the divine cosmos as any physical event and object. In The Ends for Which God Created the Earth, Edwards writes: If existence is more worthy than defect and nonentity, and if any created existence is in itself worthy to be, then knowledge or understanding is a thing worthy to be; and if any knowledge, then the most excellent sort of knowledge, viz. that of God and his glory. The existence of the created universe consists as much in it as in anything: yea, this knowledge is one of the highest, most real and substantial parts, of all created existence most remote from nonentity and defect.52

In this impression, that ideas are as real and as fluctuating a part of creation as trees, spiders, or oceans, it’s difficult not to hear early intimations of William James’s pragmatist understanding of the universe, “unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work.”53 James positions this pragmatist “growing universe” against a “rationalist” understanding of the universe—what we might consider a platonic or “religious” understanding—as one that is already fully realized and fixed.54 Interestingly, Edwards’s understanding of knowledge as an expansive part of creation breaks this dichotomy. On the one hand, belief in a perfect, sovereign God meant that the universe must be conceived of as complete and already perfect. On the other, knowledge and learning mark an expansion of consciousness that magnifies God’s good in the world. This is to say that, within Edwards’s theology the world is simultaneously complete and growing. As Sang Hyun Lee suggests, “The achievement of Edwards’ dispositional reconception of the divine being is that God is conceived as inherently and continuously creative as well as truly actual and absolutely sufficient.”55 The only way to reconcile this seeming contradiction is to return again to a hallmark of Edwards’s theology, the idea of being as doing. To use a botanical example, if part of what defines a plant is its capacity, or “disposition” to undergo metabolic processes—that part of its plant-essence includes the process of 52 53 54 55

WJE 8:423. James, Writings 1902–1910, 600. James, Writings 1902–1910, 599. Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 211.

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growth—then even a seedling may be said to be “complete” despite the fact that it hasn’t fully realized its potential. In this way, Edwards understood the completeness of God’s goodness as containing infinite potential for greater realization, especially on the part of conscious beings. “For intelligent beings,” Edwards writes, “are created to the be the consciousness of the universe, that they may perceive what God is and does.” As we’ve discussed, Edwards understood the cultivation of the intellect as an act of worship, in which the mind participated in the expansion of God’s goodness. For John Dewey, the labor of aesthetic experience also culminates in the expansive moment in consciousness—a moment that, in its given-ness, feels akin to an experience that Edwards might describe as grace. “‘Intuition’,” Dewey writes, “is that meeting of the old with and new in which the adjustment involved in every form of consciousness is effected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flash of revelation; although in fact it is prepared for by long slow incubation.”56 Like Edwards’s understanding of grace, Dewey’s aesthetic experience unifies the disjointed, and draws upon every form of thinking and feeling to do so. Even more importantly, the luminous union of old and new is a process in continual forward motion—at no point does the union signal a completion. This resonates with another essential quality of Edwards’s happiness. Edwards imagines human beings as capable of a kind of perceptual progress that brings them closer to divine nature, while simultaneously imagining a divine nature that will always exceed the capacities of human consciousness. “The more happiness the greater union,” he writes. “When the happiness is perfect, the union is perfect. And as the happiness will be increasing to eternity, the union will become more and more strict and perfect; nearer and more like to that between God the Father and the Son; who are so united, that their interest is perfectly one.”57 Here, Edwards suggests that the nature of human happiness is intrinsically partial, or incomplete—but also capable of connection and growth. For human beings, happiness is a feeling of becoming with no end. Edwards writes: There are many reasons to think that what God has in view, in an increasing communication of himself throughout eternity, is an increasing knowledge of God, love to him, and joy in him. And ‘tis to be considered that the more those divine communications increase in the creature, the more it becomes one with God: for so much the more is it united to God in love, there heart is drawn nearer and nearer to God, and the union with him becomes more firm and close: and at the same time the creature becomes more and more conformed to God. The image is more and more perfect, and so the good that is in the creature comes forever nearer and nearer to an identity with that which is in God. In

56 Dewey, Art as Experience, 277. 57 WJE 8:534.

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the view therefore of God, who has a comprehensive prospect of the increasing union and conformity through eternity, it must be an infinitely strict and perfect nearness, conformity, and oneness.58

The paradox that dwells inside the idea of “forever nearer” presents one of the many lovely challenges of Edward’s happiness. In passages such as this one, we are asked to imaginatively reconcile concepts of finitude like progress, nearness, and increase with ideas of eternity—an end that has no end. We move toward “oneness” and yet it seems to be a oneness with the process, rather than a oneness with the object. Instead of becoming complete, we are learning to become becoming itself. In moments such as this one, logic dissolves into poetry.

13.6 Final Thoughts Why, then, does it matter that one of America’s greatest Enlightenment thinkers understood happiness in aesthetic terms? What I’d like to suggest is that if we return happiness to its poetic position in Edwards’s current of thought, and correct the caricature of temperament established when we read works like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in isolation, Edwards’s thinking poses an alternative to what we might consider the dominant Enlightenment model of happiness on the American continent: one made especially coherent by figures like Benjamin Franklin and embedded into the American capitalist legacy.59 Though both Edwards and Franklin were deeply influenced by figures like Locke, they produced strikingly different understandings of what it means to be happy. While Edwards understood happiness as an art, Franklin approached it more scientifically: something to be understood causally and methodically. This scientific legacy—arguably the one with which we still live—leaves us with a version of happiness that is tied to work, achievement, and product. Within this model, happiness is earned through human effort in the marketplace and is measured in human standards of usefulness, progress, and societal esteem.60 Edwards, conversely, presents a happiness that is learned rather than earned. Through grace, happiness is everywhere available to human beings if they are willing to under58 WJE 8:443. 59 There is a long tradition of setting up Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin as foils for one another—often in ways that radically simplify each thinker’s contributions to American philosophy and culture. In these accounts, Edwards is often presented as pious, bookish, and provincial, while Franklin—the inventor and revolutionary—is presented as a secular and worldly man-of-progress. Though the legacies associated with each thinker have moved in strikingly different directions, a longer project considering Edwards and Franklin’s shared traditions, values, and habits would be worth the undertaking. 60 Franklin, On True Happiness, 5.

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take the practice of active reception. Instead of conforming to human standards, this happiness requires the individual to imagine his place in a divine order that exceeds the reasonable human scheme. Rather than resolving unknowns to fit human purposes, Edwards’s vision of happiness emphasizes respect for mystery, deep listening, and ongoing interpretation. From the perspective of literary studies, the suggestion that the experience of reading well—communicatively, rigorously, expansively—is central to “the pursuit of happiness” is affirming. It also reminds us that as an Enlightenment project, the pursuit of happiness could have taken, and perhaps still can take many forms. At a moment in American cultural life when it seems that individuals are growing increasingly isolated from one another and the natural world despite a growing technological capacity for “connectedness,” Edwards’s model of happiness gives us much to consider. It seems to ask us what it would mean if we sought our happiness in complexity instead of convenience, or if we understood becoming as the primary significance of being. It demands that we become better, humbler and more attentive readers, that we engage ourselves more fully as intellectual seekers. Can we read in such a way as to draw all forms of being—the natural, the conceptual, the spiritual—into a more complex web of relation? Perhaps we will, like Edwards’s spider, learn to stretch these webs widely with abundance of pleasure.

Theology

Sarah B. Boss (Károli Gáspár University)

“The Wheels of a Watch” Jonathan Edwards’s Emblematic Philosophy of Time

14.1 Introduction The nature of time has haunted philosophers, theologians, and the average person since its beginning. But, like Heraclitus’ proverbial river, time seems to be an ever-changing concept which is impossible to pin down or define. Throughout history, time has manifested as a cosmic river, the Greek Oceanus; an eternal snake which devours its own tail, the Ouroboros; and even a scythe-wielding skeleton, Death itself.1 One recurring theme in the quest to explain time, however, is the visual. Whether philosophers draw on images from the natural world or an idealized realm, they invariably draw on the visual in attempts to define time. One, if not the predominant, such image of time is the wheel. The wheel has appeared as a depiction of time as early as the ancient Indian Samsara, a rotating wheel of birth and death and endless reincarnations; even Oceanus and the Ouroboros form cyclical patterns.2 During the Middle Ages this wheel imagery reached its pinnacle in the Wheel of Fortune; Boethius was especially instrumental in propagating this image, and his Consolation of Philosophy (524) “provided a powerful impetus to the verbal and pictorial representation of Fortune during the Middle Ages.”3 In the Renaissance the Wheel of Fortune continued to flourish throughout emblems and literature from the Elizabethan era. However, in the Enlightenment the wheel was upgraded to a mechanical gear, 1 Marie-Louise Franz, Time: Rhythm and Repose (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 12. 2 Franz, Time: Rhythm and Repose, 11. 3 Frederick Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethean Tragedy (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1983), 8. Boethius, the sixth-century Roman philosopher, was a bridge between antiquity and the Middle Ages. His magnum opus, Consolation of Philosophy (524), was one of the most widely read works of the Medieval period. For further study of Boethius and the Wheel of Fortune, see Jerold Frakes, The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle Ages: The Boethian Tradition (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1988).

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which, though preserving the basic visual, redefined the notion of time.4 This transition was more than cosmetic; the evolving depictions of time were symptomatic of core changes in the seventeenth-century transatlantic world view. In the midst of changing concepts of time, Jonathan Edwards stands as a pivotal yet overlooked figure. Avihu Zakai notes, “So far there has been no serious attempt to explore Edwards’s philosophy of history and to analyze the content and form of his distinct mode of historical thought.”5 Zakai provides this serious attempt, revealing patterns in Edwards’s development of a philosophy of history. However, in this essay I would like not only to address Edwards’s philosophy of history but also to situate his notion of time in the context of Renaissance thought which preceded him. Zakai and others have noted the extent to which Edwards’s philosophical writings were direct responses to and rebuttals of his Enlightenment contemporaries.6 Where time is concerned, the issue at stake for Edwards is critical for the Christian world view. Edwards could foresee where Enlightenment notions of time would lead: a godless, one dimensional world. By contrast, Edwards saw the world as a place filled with God’s immediate presence, a world in which “the works of God are a language of God.”7 Such a conviction stood in direct opposition to the Enlightenment’s distant clock maker God and is much more akin to the Renaissance “emblematic world view.”8 William Ashworth, who coined this term, described the Renaissance world as “an entirely 4 René Descartes was a champion of such mechanical metaphors, noting in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) a comparison between “a blind impulse of the animal spirits” and the motion “in a clock or any other machine.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 144. Following Descartes, many philosophers, including Leibniz and Wolff, brought the clock metaphor into the German Enlightenment, as well, using the clock to reinforce the stronghold of human reason. Upgrading the Renaissance wheel to a mechanical machine or clock was one way in which Enlightenment philosophy flattened theories of time and space, as Avihu Zakai writes, into “a homogenous, uniform, and symmetrical one-dimensional world of nature,” For further reading, see Avihu Zakai, “The Theological Origins of Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature,” in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60, no. 4, (2009) and Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 5 Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiii. 6 Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 4. Also see Stephen Daniel, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 7 WJE 11:67. 8 William B. Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 305. Ashworth argues that the role of natural history in the Scientific Revolution has been vastly misunderstood by previous scholarship. He proposes that the transition from the Renaissance to the modern age cannot be properly understood without examining the integral role the rediscovery of classical sources on animals and proverbs played in the sixteenth-century conception of the natural world as a multifaceted reality.

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different world from ours, a world where animals are just one aspect of an intricate language of metaphor, symbols, and emblems.”9 Within such a world view, a sixteenth-century natural historian like Conrad Gesner can compile a chapter on the peacock in his bestiary Historia Animalium (1551) which includes both physical descriptions and classical myths associated with the peacock in order to create the most accurate or true account of the creature.10 This emblematic world closely resembles the typological one Edwards describes. Here a preliminary distinction must be made concerning emblems and typology. The emblem was one of the major vehicles of cultural knowledge in the early modern period and was an integral part of Renaissance material culture. The typical emblem consisted of a brief motto in Latin or a European vernacular language (inscriptio), an enigmatic picture (pictura), and an epigram (subscriptio). Collections of these emblems, called emblem books, reached a mass of roughly 6,500 in the Renaissance and dealt with a wide range of issues, including ethics, natural philosophy, politics, science, religion, love, war, and everyday life.11 Strictly speaking, emblems are a more visual mode than types (although some emblems were “nude” and merely textual) and possess a greater range in content, whereas traditional typology reveals the ways in which Old Testament figures are fulfilled in the New Testament.12 For example, Jesus fulfills the Old Testament prophets as the “Son of Man” and is the “New Adam.”13 However, Edwards expanded traditional typology to include all of the natural realm. His notebook “Images of Divine Things”14 captures this amplified typology perfectly, as Edwards notes correspondences between the natural world and spiritual, biblical truths. In doing so, he minimized the difference between emblems and typology, a connection which has been alluded to by Tibor Fabiny, touched on by Anna Svetlikova, and traced by Robert Boss.15 Moreover, Edwards accomplished very similar results as Renaissance authors and artists in their various efforts to define or describe time. Edwards is particularly interesting, however, because he employs Enlightenment inventions to do so. In this essay I will attempt to reveal the ways in which Jonathan Edwards appropriated Enlightenment metaphors of 9 Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” 305. 10 Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” 305. 11 Mara R. Wade, “What Is an Emblem?” Emblematica Online, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/help/what-emblem. 12 Tibor Fabiny, Figura and Fulfillment (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 2. 13 Fabiny, Figura and Fulfillment 61, 67. 14 WJE 11. 15 Tibor Fabiny, “Edwards and Biblical Typology,” in Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian, ed. Gerald McDermott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101. Anna Svetlikova, Typology as Rhetoric: Reading Jonathan Edwards (PhD dissertation: Charles University, 2012). Robert L. Boss, God-Haunted World: The Elemental Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Fort Worth: Jonathan Edwards Society Press, 2015).

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machinery, wheels and clocks to express a philosophy which was closely akin to Renaissance emblems of time. Yet, despite the use of Enlightenment imagery and the similarity to Renaissance concepts, Edwards fused these opposites to create a new philosophy of time and space which emphasized the presence of the divine more than his contemporaries or predecessors in a distinctly Christian way. In seeking to prove this hypothesis, I will compare and contrast various Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Edwardsean ideas of time as they relate to God, humans, and history.

14.2 Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Edwardsean Views of Time and God The first, most fundamental aspect of time for Renaissance philosophers and Edwards is the divine, and the increasing absence of the divine is likewise central for Enlightenment notions of time. As time became desacramentalized and God became the deists’ “watchmaker” with the development of the clock in the eighteenth century, Edwards advocated a Renaissance conviction of divine time. In the Renaissance, God was depicted as the divine timekeeper. He was Father Time, a Janus-faced figure both benevolent and menacing.16 A particular Francis Quarles emblem illustrates the later characteristic, depicting Father Time as a skeleton holding an hourglass withering towards death. Erwin Panofsky has traced the transition of the divine Father Time from a generous patriarch to a vindictive punisher, due to the confusion of the Greek terms Chronos (time) and Kronos (Saturn).17 Especially with the association of Father Time with Kronos, the Greek Titan who devours his children, time became an undeniably divine figure, developing out of classical mythology. A second divine embodiment of time was the goddess Fortuna. This goddess was drawn over either a sphere or the Wheel of Fortune, which constantly turned and could result in either good or bad fortune.18 Medieval and Renaissance authors alluded often to Fortuna and her 16 Ricardo Quinones, “The New Dynamic of Time in Renaissance Literature and Society,” Time: The Greatest Innovator (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986. 25–37), 26. 17 Erwin Panofsky, celebrated art historian, pioneered twentieth-century studies of hidden symbols in art and iconography. The confusion between Chronos and Kronos which he explores has been a blurred distinction for centuries, even since Plutarch. For further reading on this delineation, see Erwin Panofsky, “Father Time,” Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 69–94. 18 Records of Fortuna appeared as early as the third century BCE and continued to permeate both written and visual art of the Medieval and Renaissance ages, as she was a striking optic figure. One emblem from Andrea Alciato’s popular Emblemata (1591) shows Fortuna opposite Hermes; the inscription beneath reads, “As Fortune rests on a sphere, so Hermes sits on a cube. He presides over the arts, she over the varied chances of life. Art was developed to

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wheel, from Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer in the high Middle Ages to Marlowe, Johnson, and Shakespeare in the Elizabethean era.19 Shakespeare referenced her via Edmund in King Lear, who laments, “The wheel has come full circle, I am here.”20 Just as Father Time could be either good or bad, so, too, could Fortuna be a good omen or a harbinger of misfortune. Furthermore, the clock itself was an instrument of the divine in the Renaissance. The early designs of the clock in the fourteenth century were modeled as a microcosm of the universe. These “universes in miniature” were both status symbols for the wealthy and aids for philosophers seeking to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos.21 Scholars have proposed that the measuring of time was merely a secondary feature of clocks in the fourteenth century; their primary purpose was as “astronomical models made to demonstrate the workings of the universe.”22 Indeed, the development of the clock coincided with the advancement of astronomy as a discipline, and together these carried religious intentions. The clock was a model of a divine plan, revealing the unfolding of divinely preordained historical events. In his Vision of God (1453), Nicholas of Cusa writes, “Let then the concept of the clock represent eternity’s self; then motion in the clock representeth succession. Eternity therefore both enfoldeth and unfoldeth succession, since the concept of the clock which is eternity doth alike enfold and unfold things.”23 Such a view embodies the orderly, providential notion of time in the Renaissance. Even a century later, the clock was associated with a divine influence, as seen in a 1551 sketch demonstrating the mechanics of a clock, operating by water poured from the disembodied hand of God in the upper corner of the page.24 For a while, then, even as the clock developed, it retained its association with the divine. However, this would not last long. With the advent of the Enlightenment, the clock lost its divine association and became purely an instrument of science. Divine time was replaced by measurable time as the clock developed.25 As it became increasingly instrumental for the

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

counteract the effect of Fortune, but when Fortune is bad it often needs the assistance of Art. Therefore, studious youths, learn good arts, which bring with them the benefits of an outcome not subject to chance.” Andrea Alciato, “Ars naturam adiuvans,” Emblemata (1591). For a study of the goddess’s role in the the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see: Simona Cohen, Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014). Frederick Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethean Tragedy (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1983), xv, 2. William Shakespeare, King Lear (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2009), 5.3.174. Silvio Bedini, “The Map of Time,” Time: The Greatest Innovator (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986. 11–22), 17. Bedini, “The Map of Time,” 14. Quoted in Franz, 17. Rudimenta mathematica, pictured in Franz, 68. Rudimenta mathematica, pictured in Franz, 68.9.

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study of astronomy, the clock increased in precision. Originally, its ability to keep time correctly was secondary to its appearance and replication of cosmic features. Yet, with its newfound purpose, the clock was visually transformed into a carefully designed machine. One of the major changes the clock underwent was the addition of the pendulum, which previously had been used to drive other mechanisms. The perfect rhythmicity of the pendulum reflected the Enlightenment belief in the unchanging prescribed order of time.26 And with the advent of the mechanical clock, “Time, though invisible and without substance, was fettered.”27 Notions of divinity disintegrated as the clock became a purely scientific instrument, and the mysterious became the merely measurable. As the clock lost its divine association, so was time also desacramentalized in the Enlightenment. Philosophers like Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, and Robert Boyle heralded a mechanistic view of the universe, in which God was a distant figure, the divine watchmaker who created a self-ordering cosmos in which he does not interfere. Newton believed that “like a watchmaker, God was forced to intervene in the universe and tinker with the mechanism from time to time to ensure that it continued operating in good working order.” Similarly, Descartes viewed “the cosmos as a great time machine operating according to fixed laws, a watch created and wound up by the great watchmaker.”28 With God downgraded in such a way, the Renaissance’s Father Time faded into fairy tales. Paul Tillich observes that in the seventeenth century Kronos, and with him a sense of divine time, was replaced by Chronos, or measured time.29 Time ceased to be a divine, driving force that existed outside of the human sphere and instead became something that existed alongside humans and could even be controlled by them, as scientists and philosophers sought to measure, cut, and capture time. No longer did Father Time and Fortuna determine the fates of humans; in the Enlightenment the time-God was an absent figure, and the notion of time left in his wake was no longer his to control. In the midst of the Enlightenment desacramentalization of time, Edwards returned to the Enlightenment conviction of divine time. He rejected the mechanization of the universe and the distant watchmaker God proposed by the deists. By contrast, he preached a God in whom time was intimately, inextricably bound. Whereas Cotton Mather and others of Edwards’s New England counterparts accepted the new science of the Enlightenment and assimilated it into their view of God’s order in nature, Edwards rejected it completely. Zakai notes that Edwards was able to see the trajectory on which mechanization traveled and, 26 Rudimenta mathematica, 88. 27 Eric C. Brown, The Control of Time in Renaissance England: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne (PhD dissertation: Louisiana State University, 1998), 16. 28 Brown, The Control of Time in Renaissance England, 16. 29 Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Touchstone Books, 1972), 1.

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as a response, objected that there is “no such thing as mechanization.”30 His proposed alternative, as expressed in “On Atoms” and later throughout his “Miscellanies,” is a world order even more theocentric than his predecessors’.31 God plays a central role in Edwards’ notion of time by his continuous upholding of every atom and every moment, his everlasting sustaining of space and time. Mark Hamilton defines Edwards’s concept of continuous creation as “the idea that God’s creating a particular thing ex nihilo (out of nothing), and his preservation of that thing are fundamentally the same timeless divine act.”32 Continuous creation, however, is both timeless and time-full; God upholds every second through his divine consciousness. This idea of a mental, idealized divine state in which the world exists hearkens back to Plato and was revolutionary for Edwards’ eighteenth-century context. Yet it was only through an insistence on the divine upholding of even the smallest aspects of time and space that Edwards was able to combat mechanism.33 Moreover, while rejecting the existence of mechanization, Edwards nonetheless appropriated mechanistic metaphors to express his notion of divinely operated time and space. Specifically concerning the nature of God as an operator of time, Edwards describes the Trinity as wheels in a machine. In his sermon series A History of the Work of Redemption, he writes, This is what I call the Work of Redemption in the doctrine, for ’tis all but one work, one design. The various dispensations and works that belong to it are but the several parts of one scheme. ’Tis but one design that is done to which all the offices of Christ do directly tend, and in which all the persons of the Trinity do conspire and all the various dispensations that belong it are united, as several wheels in one machine, to answer one end and produce one effect.34

In this passage, Edwards outlines the order, harmony, and providence within the works God has produced in the world as well as within the Godhead itself. His History of the Work of Redemption returns to the notion of sacred, not measured time, which operates outside of the human sphere as part of a divine plan. Yet Edwards takes a familiar concept of disparate events in time working toward a divinely appointed end and elaborates this metaphor to include God himself. 30 WJE 6:217. 31 Edwards most likely composed “On Atoms” in 1721 and Miscellany no. tt “On Devotion” (which will be discussed in more detail later) in 1722 during his time in New York. For more information on the dating of these texts, see Wallace E. Anderson, “Collegiate and Graduate Studies 1716–22,” in WJE 6 and Harry S. Stout, “New York, Windsor, and Bolton, 1722–1724,” in WJE 13 (Entry Nos. a-z, aa-zz, 1–500). 32 Mark Hamilton, A Treatise on Jonathan Edwards: Continuous Creation and Christology (Fort Worth: Jonathan Edwards Society Press, 2017), 5. 33 Zakai, 117. 34 WJE 9:118.

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Here the Trinity does not only watch over the Wheel of Fortune like the goddess Fortuna; it is the wheel. More specifically, being a divine mystery, the Trinity is a wheel within a wheel, reminiscent of the paradoxical wheels in Ezekiel.35 These wheels form “one machine,” which produces “one end.” Edwards emphasizes the providential nature of time, which, parallel to God himself, works in perfect harmony to achieve a specific purpose. By appropriating Enlightenment metaphors of machinery, marrying them to Renaissance ideas of the Wheel of Fortune, and using this language to describe the Trinity, Edwards expresses a concept of time that is deeply divine.

14.3 Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Edwardsean Views of Time and Humans A second integral component in time is the role of humans, who, unlike the divine, are constricted to operate within time. Whereas Renaissance philosophers felt a burden not to waste time but to “redeem” it lest they face retribution from the time-God, Enlightenment philosophers felt no outward pressure but instead emphasized human agency in their own time of life. Edwards introduced a third view on this matter. Though also expressing a Renaissance concern for redeeming time, he was focused less on human life and more on the end or purpose of time, of which humans are only small gears. In the Renaissance, as the clock became an increasingly popular item and the notion of time was becoming a more central aspect of life, so, too, was concern growing over the use and misuse of time and the consequences of the latter. This was a shift from the view of the Middle Ages, in which, Ricardo Quinones notes, Life still had religious associations with the universe, [its] beginnings and [its] ends were in the hands of a providential and concerned divinity. … Neither time nor change appear to be critical, and hence there is no great worry about controlling the future. But for the new men of the Renaissance, time was not plentiful but rare and precious.36

This concern is aptly expressed in an emblem entitled “Of the Use of Time.” The emblem features a picture of a sun overlooking a garden in which a large sundial sits. Below the image is the poem: True to the Sun the Dial still abides And points Time’s course minutely as it glides; This bids us hasten to be wise, and show How rapid in their course the minutes flow; 35 Cf. Ezekiel 1:15–21. 36 Quoted in Brown, 7.

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Seize on the winged hours without delay, Nor trust tomorrow while you live today.

Below the poem is the “moral”: Time well employed is a most certain gain, Earnest of pleasure, remedy for pain; The chief of blessings on its course attends, Since on its use Eternity depends.37

This emblem demonstrates how the clock is an instrument subservient to time, not for measuring but for instructing morality. This is shown in two ways. First, the Dial is “true” to the Sun—a recurring motif for God—and points to Time, which has already been established as another pseudonym for the divine being in the Renaissance. Together, the Dial and Time reveal a truth of reality, i. e., that life is short, and encourage humans “to be wise.” The moral in this emblem makes this lesson even more direct, as it attests that Eternity depends on learning such wisdom from time and using time well. That is, good use of time results in salvation after death, whereas ill use of time results in damnation. In no uncertain terms, this emblem preaches the wisdom time possesses and the responsibility humans hold to use time well—to eternal consequences. Another emblem which illustrates a similar worry over the use of time is one originally composed in French by Guillaume de la Perrière, then translated into English by Thomas Combe and published in 1614. This particular emblem depicts a man trapped beneath a large winged clock. The motto reads, “When youth is in his flowering prime, | He cares not how he pass his time.” Beneath this, a poem elaborates: Redeem the time, time dearer is than gold, And time once gone can never be reclaimed, He need begin betimes that would grow old, If time be lost, our life is likewise maimed. Yet green young heads disdaining to be told, As though more privilege of years they claimed, Do seem to pull the weights with all their sway, And waste their time and haste their dying day.38

This emblem draws from Scripture, quoting a line from the New Testament, as Ephesians 5:15–16 warns, “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” Similar to the previous 37 “Of the Use of Time,” Emblematica Online, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/detail/emblem/E023624. 38 Thomas Combe, “Redeem the Time,” in The Theater of Fine Devices, ed. Richard Field. (London: The Huntington Library, 1983).

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emblem, Combe’s also emphasizes the necessity of using time well. And the stakes are still high, as both emblems conclude with the assurance of death and the eternal consequences of the use of time. Furthermore, both emblems encourage a measure of paranoia regarding time: The first warns not to “trust tomorrow while you live today,” and the second implies a warning that the reader not be like the youths who imagine a long life to be their “privilege of years” and so bring about their own destruction as they “waste their time and haste their dying day.” So then these emblems emphasize the foolishness and disregard for time espoused by youth. In doing so, they also teach the unwavering course of time which stands outside of human ambition and the clock which ticks more swiftly for those who disregard it. A third, more ominous emblem reveals the course of life for a human who fails to redeem time as these previous emblems have admonished. “Tempus erit,” one of the emblems in Francis Quarles’s emblem book Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (1638) shows a more complex image of time. In it, Father Time holds an hourglass and stands behind a skeleton who is poised to snuff out a large candle; in the background looms an upright sundial. Beneath the image are the words “Tempus erit,” Latin for “Time will be.” Following this is a Scripture verse, Ecclesiastes 3:1: “To every thing there is an appointed time.” Next, the poem in this emblem, which is rather lengthy, is a dialogue between Time and Death, in which Time laments how weak the flame is and Death complains of its brightness. The two argue over Death’s desire to snuff it out prematurely but agree that Death alone has power over his shaft and Time alone over his hour. The poem concludes with Time asserting, Alas, thou canst not make the poorest Flower To hang the drooping head, till then: Thy shafts can neither Kill, Nor strike, until My power gives them wings, and pleasure arm thy will.

After the poem is a quote from Augustine: “Thou knowest not what Time he will come: wait always, that because thou knowest not the time of his coming, thou must be prepared against the time he comes. And for this, perchance, thou knowest not the Time, because though must be prepared against all times.” Finally, an epigram reads: Expect, but fear not Death: Death cannot kill, Till Time (that first must seal her Patent) will: Wouldst thou live long? Keep Time in high esteem, Whom, gone, if thou canst not recall, redeem.39

39 Francis Quarles, “Tempus erit,” in Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (1638).

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Quarles’s multifaceted emblem asserts the same themes of the brevity and precariousness of mortality, the power Father Time holds over human life (and even Death), and the urgency of being prepared for unexpected death. And it is not only a sudden death Quarles is concerned with, but also the unknown time of Christ’s return. By including the quote from Augustine, Quarles warns his readers not only to take care to use time well but to be prepared for the end of time itself. So then the notion of “redeeming” time carries both transient, human and eternal, divine sentiments. Throughout each of these emblems runs a thread of both concern for the right or redeemed use of time and an acute awareness of the tenuousness of human life. The Enlightenment abandoned this worry over the use of time. Although some like Benjamin Franklin did encourage a conscientious care for time—most notably in his maxim “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”40—Enlightenment concern over the use of time was entirely different from that of the Renaissance due to the vastly different role of human agency. Whereas Renaissance emblems stressed human dependency on Time’s will and the mystery of the predetermined number of hours in each person’s life, Enlightenment thinkers taught the power of human control over their own days. The Renaissance emphasized the “irreversible strength of the flow of time or the movement of the wheel” and the conviction that “human efforts are ridiculously ineffective in interfering with the elemental course of time even if the wheel’s position favours evil forces.”41 By contrast, the Enlightenment brought the trajectory of time into view, focusing on what humans could accomplish in the foreseeable future rather than worry about the unknown twists and turns of Time as those in the Renaissance. The Enlightenment also denied any connection between time and the mysteries of salvation and God’s providence.42 In doing so, Enlightenment philosophers turned any concern of time away from fear of eternal consequences and towards personal ambition. Father Time was no longer a figure to be feared, worshiped, or obeyed; he was stripped of his “hour,” just as death’s “shaft,” in a godless world, was no longer to be feared. Time was to be used well in the Enlightenment for the sake of the self, not due to some external, mysterious plan or law. However, the “pervasive emphasis on dividing time into 40 Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac (Waterloo: The U.S.C. Publishing Co., 1914), 20. Puritan Even Franklin’s maxim, which may be called tongue in cheek, disregarded the divine aspect of time. This American Founding Father, a contemporary of Edwards’s, could not express a more different value system than the Puritan minister’s. For a study of the differences between these two great minds, see George Marsden, A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 41 Tibor Fabiny, “Ripeness is All”: The Wheel of Time as a System of Imagery in Shakespeare’s Dramas (Szeged: Attila Jozsef University, 1982), 7. 42 Zakai, 144.

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as many profitable moments as possible was reflected in the invention of the mechanical clock, around the end of the thirteenth century.”43 Moreover, time and the clock were removed from the status of revered teacher in the Enlightenment because they were merely members of the world automaton, not mouthpieces for Father Time. Thus, in the Enlightenment, time ceased to be Godcentric and became instead human-centric. Edwards, of course, rejected a human-focused notion of time and life. In general, the Puritans preached “individual attentiveness to time,” and Edwards was no exception.44 Like the emblems, he emphasized the fragility of life and necessity to be ready for death. These sentiments can be found throughout Edwards’s writings, but appear strikingly in a letter to his teenage son: Before you will receive this letter, the matter will doubtless be determined, as to your having the small-pox. You will either be sick with that distemper, or will be past danger of having it, from any infection taken in your voyage. But whether you are sick or well, like to die or like to live, I hope you are earnestly seeking your salvation.45

Edwards continues in the letter to describe young people in a way very similar to the emblems; they are short-sighted, self-assured, and not as fearful for their salvation as they should be. Beyond this letter and Edwards’s concern for his son’s salvation, he also echoed the Renaissance desire to “redeem time.” One of Edwards’s sermons, appropriately entitled “The Preciousness Of Time And The Importance Of Redeeming It,” exhorts parishioners to take care how they use time and reflects Edwards’s own lifelong pursuit of a wise use of time. This sermon is derived from the same biblical text as Quarles’s emblem: “Redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:16). In it, Edwards prompts his parishioners to consider their use of time gone by. He writes, There are many of you that may well conclude that half your time is gone. If you should live to the ordinary age of man, your glass is more than half run, and perhaps there may be but few sands remaining: your sun is past the meridian, and perhaps just a-setting, or going into an everlasting eclipse. Consider therefore what account can you give of your improvement of your past time. How have you let the precious golden sands of your glass run?46

Edwards essentially creates an audible emblem, a mental picture of a setting sun and draining hourglass, which are meant to stir the listener to consider the transiency of human life. He concludes his sermon, much like the emblems, by reminding his parishioners of the end of their lives and the eternity that awaits

43 44 45 46

Brown, 18. Brown, 2. WJE 16:579. WJE 19:252.

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them. In these ways, Edwards returns to the Renaissance insistence on divine time rather than human potential. Edwards also departed from his Enlightened peers by focusing on time as a mysterious, external entity. Like Augustine, who conceived time as a force beyond what can be measured or conceived in historical records, Edwards emphasized the magnitude and suprahuman quality of time. Time was to be redeemed from or out of time, not merely for the sake of more measurable time.47 Edwards viewed time not as a tool for human achievement or a ticking automaton, but as a harmonious display of God’s providence, of which humans are only small parts. Continuing his efforts to combat mechanistic philosophy, Edwards employed his own form of mechanism to express this belief. In “Miscellany” no. tt “On Devotion,” he responds to those who say the world works in such a way that the harmony lies in how well its gears fit together, rather than the purpose to which those gears turn. He responds in indignation, quipping that “it is a contradiction and nonsense to say, the highest end of a particular part of the world is to be useful to the rest.”48 To illustrate how pointless such an order would be, he turns to the clock. He writes, “If the highest end of every part of a clock is only mutually to assist the other parts in their motions, that clock is good for nothing at all; the clock in general is altogether useless, however every part is useful to turn round the other parts.” In response to this “nonsense,” he offers his own solution, again relying on the clock: But as in a clock one wheel moves another, and that another, till at last we come to the hand, and there we end—the use of that immediately respects the eye of man—so it is in the world: some less perfect inanimate beings are useful to the more perfect, and they to beasts, one beast to another, and they to man. And what is man made for? where shall we go next? Surely man was not made for beasts; we must not go back again. Or is man good for nothing at all? The next immediate step is to the Creator. He was undoubtedly made to glorify the Creator, so that devotion must be his highest end. The hand of the clock was not made to move the wheels; we must not go back: after we are come from wheel to wheel, at last to the hand, the next immediate step is to the eye. In the creation, there is an immediate communication between one degree of being and the next degree of being (every wheel immediately communicates with the next wheel), but man being the top; so that the next immediate step from him is to God.49

By comparing human life to wheels of a clock, Edwards pointedly demonstrates the ridiculousness of a life with no higher purpose, in which humans are “good for nothing at all.” In true Edwardsean fashion, he weaves a tightly logical argument, turning his opponents’ words—and even their metaphors—in on

47 Zakai, 160, 189. 48 WJE 13:191. 49 WJE 13:191.

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themselves. In contrast to the Enlightenment philosophers’ nonsensical clock which works to no end, Edwards’s clock is theocentric and providential. Its harmony is not an expression of soulless autonomy or human invention, but a driving force of divine time.

14.4 Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Edwardsean Views of History Finally, the divine and the human meet where time is expressed in history. Edwards’s philosophy of history, while revolving around a divine force like Renaissance history and revealing a trajectory of progress like Enlightenment history, was unique in its singular focus on the history of redemption. In the Renaissance, notions of history, parallel with concepts of Janus-faced Father Time and Fortuna, were of a cyclical nature. Fortune—or the goddess Fortuna— was often illustrated sitting atop or supervising the Wheel of Fortune, to which humans were pinned in an unending change of fate.50 A cyclical, repetitive view of history follows necessarily from this image of the Wheel of Fortune and characterization of Fortuna. In a world in which humans’ lives are at the mercy of an unpredictable divine force, there can be no logic, no path binding the ages together. In such a world, Fortune is illogical, arbitrary, and deaf to the pleas of humans.51 And not only is the Renaissance Fortuna illogical; she is also blind. In Henry V, Shakespeare depicts Fortuna in detail when Fluellen proclaims: Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls. In good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.52

Shakespeare presents Fortuna in the emblematic fashion, as the artist would portray her. And beyond emblems, Fortuna was an ever-present visual figure for the medieval and Renaissance person, as she appeared throughout cathedrals; 50 Franz, 25. 51 Kiefer, 1–2. 52 William Shakespeare, Henry V (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2009), 3.6.22–33. William Shakespeare, the preeminent Renaissance poet and playwright, captures the “emblematic world view” and incorporates references to Fortuna, the Wheel of Fortune, and Father Time in his works. For further reading, see Tibor Fabiny, “Ripeness is All”: The Wheel of Time as a System of Imagery in Shakespeare’s Dramas (Szeged: Attila Jozsef University, 1982); and Tibor Fabiny, “’Rota Fortunae’ and the Symbolism of Evil in Shakespearean Tragedy” (Journal of Literature and Theology 3.3, 1989).

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even the classic rose window is a symbol of her wheel.53 Between her wheel and the rolling sphere beneath her foot, Shakespeare’s imagined artist captures the vicissitudinous nature of Fortuna. A blind controller of individual lives and thereby of all of history, as Shakespeare imagines Fortuna to be, cannot also be a creator of linear, progressive history. Yet such progress is precisely what those following the Renaissance desired. Enlightenment philosophies of history differ from those of the Renaissance both in form and content. This new history deconstructed the wheel and flattened it into a one-dimensional line of progress. Enlightenment history also tore down previous notions of time by re-centering history on the human rather than the divine. The history of the Enlightenment was no longer the story of divine beings or religious principles but the historia humana—a chronicle focused on social and political activities, in which humans played the starring role.54 This kind of history was novel; previous histories had relied on the biblical example of providential explanations in order to account for human events. However, shifting toward the desacramentalization of time, along with that of the clock, David Hume prescribed the role of the historian as to “take a general survey of the age, so far as regards manners, finances, arms, commerce, arts and sciences. The chief use of history is that it affords materials for disquisition of this nature.”55 Following this prescription, Enlightenment historians were focused on an attempt to “liberate history writing from its subservience to theology” and no longer to view “the course of human history as the realization of a divine plan,” essentially creating history into a “de-divinization of the world.”56 As Enlightenment philosophers were already more concerned with human rather than divine agency in the span of time, this elevation of humans also changed historical narratives. Narratives became fixated on human progress and perfectability. As time could be measured, so, too, could progress. And not only measured, but improved upon and hastened. So the Wheel of Fortune, which spun indefinitely and indefatigably, stopped. However, Zakai argues that rather than enriching the writing of history, Enlightenment fixation on progress resulted in “empty time.”57 Enlightenment history stripped historical narratives of multi-dimensional aspects of divine intervention, human morality, and personal 53 Kiefer, 10–11. 54 Zakai, 9, 130. 55 Quoted in Zakai, 231. David Hume, eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher and historian, wrote The History of England (1754–61), in which dealt with the history of the nation from the time of the Roman Empire to the modern era. In this work, Hume embodied the historian he idealized, expanding the scope of history to include all manner of human accomplishment, even the arts and sciences. 56 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 372–373. 57 Zakai, 144.

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instruction that the Renaissance and earlier eras had possessed. Rather than creating a larger, epic narrative of progress, the Enlightenment shrunk the scope of history to what could be measured or played out in the mortal sphere. Jonathan Edwards, situated in the midst of these new Enlightenment constructs of history, did not accept the new de-divinizational trends. Yet his history was not a simple return to those of the Renaissance either. In line with the Renaissance, Edwards’s view of history was theocentric; God was the author of history. The major events of history were not social or political developments, as Enlightenment historians would like to suggest, but divine acts. Zakai argues that Edwards’s philosophy of history hinges on outpourings of the Holy Spirit in revivals.58 These times of revival are kairos, or “right times,” to return to Panofsky’s terms. Just as for Augustine, time “must be ultimately redeemed and unified in salvation, a release from the vicissitudes of mundane time.”59 However, Edwards’s history did not fall into an unending, cyclical pattern; there was a beginning, middle, and end, as dictated by these seasons of grace.60 As such, Edwards’s history is undeniably progressive. Nowhere is this laid out more clearly than in A History of the Work of Redemption, in which Edwards proposes to address the linear progress from the beginning of time to the apocalypse and beyond, as expressed in Scripture. This history is even more progressive than those of the Enlightenment, however, because Edwards considers the many facets of both human life and divine intervention, and so considers progress on a much larger scale. Edwards was not alone in conceiving of such a history; Protestant Reformers also viewed history as divine, providential progress. In doing so, they directly opposed the idea of Fortuna and her wheel.61 Edwards, though following in the Judeo-Christian rejection of cyclical history, nonetheless used the Renaissance metaphor of the wheel and the Enlightenment language of mechanics to express his philosophy of history. In “Image” no. 178 of “Images of Divine Things,” Edwards writes, “The wheels of a WATCH or a CLOCK move contrary one to another, some one way, some another, yet all serve the intent of the workman, to show the time, or to make the clock to strike. So in the world, the providence of God may seem to run cross to his promises, one man takes this way, another takes that way; good men go one way, wicked men another, yet all in the conclusion accomplish the will, and center in the purpose, of God the great Creator of all things” (Spencer’s Similes and Sentences, p. 69).62

58 59 60 61 62

Zakai., 13. Brown, 17. Zakai, 167, 202. Kiefer, 17. WJE 11:119.

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It should be noted that this particular image is a direct quotation from John Spencer, amid seventeenth-century Englishman whose Things New and Old; or, A Store-house of Similes (1658) Edwards quoted multiple times in “Images.” Despite this particular entry being a quote from Spencer and not his own words, Edwards agreed with Spencer enough to copy this passage in its entirety in his own notebook. This image describes the way in which seemingly contradicting wheels of a clock work together to reveal time, and, in the same way, God uses the contrary paths of wicked and good humans alike for his greater purposes. Edwards emphasizes divine providence throughout the lives of all humans, regardless of goodness, and the parallel between such people and the various gears or wheels in a clock. Whereas the Enlightenment philosopher may use the clock as a symbol for human self-sufficiency, for Edwards the clock is yet another piece of evidence supporting God’s omnipotence over his creation and all the humans who inhabit it. Just a few entries later, in “Image” no. 200, Edwards returns to this theme. He observes, That machines for the measuring of time are by wheels, and wheels within wheels, some lesser, some greater; some of quicker, others of slower revolution; some moving one way, others another; some wheels dependent on others and all connected together, all adjusted one to another and all conspiring to bring about the same effect, livelily represents the course of things in time from day to day, from year to year, and from age to age, as ordered and governed by divine providence.63

Much like the earlier “Image,” this entry also emphasizes the divine providence which steers all discordances and apparent juxtapositions of life towards a larger, harmonious end. That is, just as various wheels in a clock bring about one effect within the machine, so, too, are various events through the days and ages of history ordered by divine providence. This entry also strongly echoes Ezekiel 1:15–16: Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.

These verses, like Edwards’s own words, express a paradoxical harmony of multiple wheels or gears acting as one. This “Image” illustrates not only the harmony and providence in Edwards’s view of the divine, but also his concept of history. Edwards deals not only with the life of an individual, as in “The Preciousness of Time,” but every aspect of human time, from “day” to “year” to “age”; in using this range of terms, Edwards applies the metaphor of the wheel to 63 WJE 11:126.

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every aspect of life, time, and history, no matter how large or small. He announces that each aspect of time is “governed by divine providence.” Moreover, the emphasis is not restricted to human life, as was the case in both the Renaissance and Enlightenment but is on the divine force that orders and exists beyond all units of time. Edwards’s historical narrative does not play out on the stage of human life, but on a cosmic scheme of creation, salvation, and eternity.

14.5 Conclusion Caught between two irreconcilable world views, Jonathan Edwards synthesizes Renaissance beliefs in divine time with Enlightenment, developments of progressive history, all while maintaining an orthodox Christian doctrine. While accomplishing this, Edwards twists Enlightenment language of mechanics and clockwork to reject Enlightenment mechanistic philosophy. In doing so, he creates a vivid picture of a divinely ordered universe, in which God is the author of time and providentially controls both every day of human life and even the eras of time beyond humanity. In this universe, time is a divine, harmonious force, and history is a God-authored epic which stretches beyond what humans can measure or achieve. A God who constructs and upholds such a universe is the deus revelatus—a God revealed through his creation and through time.64 Edwards himself asserts this self-revelatory nature of God throughout “Images of Divine Things.” In “Image” no. 57, he writes, ‘Tis very fit and becoming of God, who is infinitely wise, so to order things that there should be a voice of his in his works instructing those that behold them, and pointing forth and showing divine mysteries and things more immediately appertaining to himself and his spiritual kingdom. The works of God are but a kind of voice or language of God, to instruct intelligent beings in things pertaining to himself. And why should we not think that he would teach and instruct by his works in this way as well as others, viz. by representing divine things by his works, and so pointing them forth, especially since we know that God hath so much delighted in this way of instruction.65

Edwards’s universe is one ruled neither by an oftentimes malicious Father Time and illogical goddess Fortuna nor by an absent watchmaker God. Rather, it is a world in which a different kind of divine watchmaker continuously upholds his creations and breathes life into the wheels of the machine which cannot operate for even a second without him. Recognizing Edwards’ philosophy of time is relevant for both the Edwards scholar and the Christian thinker. For the scholar, considering this issue raises 64 Zakai, 203. 65 WJE 11:68.

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questions of Edwards’ philosophical relation to his Renaissance and classical predecessors, the extent to which he rejected—or appropriated—Enlightenment thought and the nature of his typological and metaphorical writing and how it may relate to established literary conventions. Hopefully, this essay has shed some measure of light on these issues, and future scholarship will take these inquiries further. The questions of what time is, how it relates to God and humans, how it can or should be expressed in history have not ceased to enrapture scholars, and these questions are perhaps even more critical today than in times past. In our current age, time has become increasingly dissected, even into milliseconds. The more time is cut and controlled, and the more humans live by the philosophy of carpe diem—a quest to control and subjugate time—time has lost any sense of eternal consequence and history is devoid of any cohesive narrative. Reinhold Niebuhr predicted this predicament, writing, If we declare ‘history’ to be totally meaningless, we also absolve the individual of responsibility for the health of the various collective enterprises, cultures, and civilizations which make up the stuff of history. The Christian faith is reduced to a purely individual transcendence over a very inscrutable collective life.66

An anecdote to meaningless time, for the Christian, is to forgo the mechanical narratives of time, which have reigned since the Enlightenment, and instead to reclaim Edwards’s emblematic philosophy of time. This philosophy, which rejects mechanism and refashions the Wheel of Fortune into the providential “wheels of a watch,” offers a meaningful, orthodox concept of time and serves as a poignant reminder to take care to live wisely and “redeem time.”

66 Reinhold Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, ed. Charles W. Kegley (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 516.

Philip John Fisk (Evangelische Theologische Faculteit)

Que sera, sera The Controversial 1702 Harvard Commencement Quaestio on whether the immutability of God’s decree takes away Human freedom of the will

15.1 Introduction But what that God afore wote, must needs bee, After the opinion of certaine clerkis. Witnesse of him that any clerke is, That in Schoole is great altercation In this matter, and great disputation, And hath been of an hundred thousand men. But I ne cannot boult it to the bren, As can the holy doctour S. Austin, Or Boece, or the Bishop Bradwardin. Whether that Gods worthy foreweting Straineth me needly to doe a thing, (Needly clepe I simple necessite) Or if the free choice be granted me To doe the same thing, or doe it nought, Though God forewot it or it was wrought. Or if his weting straineth never a dele But by necessite conditionele. I will not have to done of such matere.1

(But that which God foresees must come to be) (As there are certain scholars who aver) (Bear witness, any true philosopher) (That in the schools there has been great altercation) (Upon this question, and much disputation) (By a hundred thousand scholars, man for man) (I cannot sift it down to the pure bran) (As can the sacred Doctor, Augustine) (Or Boëthius, or Bishop Bradwardine) (Whether God’s high foreknowledge so enchains me) (I needs must do a thing as it constrains me—) (“Needs must”—that is, by plain necessity) (Or whether a free choice is granted me) (To do it or not do it, either one) (Though God must know all things before they are done) (Or whether his foresight nowise can constrain) (Except contingently, as some explain) (I will not labor such a high concern).2 – Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400)

1 Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” The Canterbury Tales, as cited by editor Henry Savile, in the Preface to the reader, in Thomas Bradwardine, De Causa Dei Contra Pelagium et de Virtute Causarum Ad Suos Mertonenses Libri Tres, ed. Henry Savile (London: John Bill, 1618). 2 Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” The Canterbury Tales in Theodore Morrison, ed. and trans., The Portable Chaucer, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 199–200.

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The approach in this essay to the 1702 commencement Quaestio is first, to introduce the question of God’s sovereignty and human choice as found in Chaucer’s medieval verse, as well as the use of the principle of sufficient reason by William Twisse, in a lead up to the 1702 Harvard commencement controversy. Second, to take note of the importance of reading with understanding the Latin idiom of the historical texts. Third, to briefly report the charge that George Keith levels against the acting Vice-President Samuel Willard, in which Keith accuses him of publicly spreading A Dangerous and Hurtfull Opinion. Fourth, to limn the Reformed scholastic distinctions given in Willard’s Brief Reply to Mr. George Keith. Fifth, take into account Willard’s ontology of possibility and contingency, exemplified in what he calls “the residue of the Spirit.” Sixth, to draw attention to the development of the early-modern and Enlightenment use of the principle of sufficient reason in the Gottfried Leibniz’ and Samuel Clarke’s Correspondence, in Johann Friedrich Stapfer’s Institutiones Theologicae Polemicae Universae, and in Jonathan Edwards’s “Controversies” Notebook and his treatise Freedom of Will (1754). I conclude by asking whether the charge leveled against Willard, of making God the author of sin, actually better applies to Edwards’s published statements on the issue than to Willard’s. I suggest the plausible explanation that Edwards was very much influenced by the Enlightenment principle of sufficient reason, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, and the law of causality, so much so that his interpretation and application of these principles exhibited an ontology of necessity when it comes to God’s relation to the world. Chaucer’s verse in the vernacular of the late-fourteenth century indicates to us the layperson’s knowledge of scholars (clerkis), who struggled with the question whether God’s foreknowledge constrains human choice. Chaucer’s use of the term, “by necessite conditionele,” in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” comes from Boece, which is Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, as well as from his knowledge of Bradwardine’s De Causa Dei, wherein Bradwardine equates necessite conditionele (conditional necessity) with necessitas consequentiae (necessity of the consequence).3 John Dryden (1631–1700) adapts Chaucer in his own Tale called “The Cock and The Fox,” raising the pointed question, at the end of the seventeenth century, whether God is the author of sin. For, “Some clerks maintain that heaven at first foresees, And in the 3 Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” The Canterbury Tales, line 3250, and Boece, bk. 5 prosa 6, lines 180–181, in Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, Third ed., new foreword by Christopher Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 259, 468. The translators of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” note that necessitee condicioneel is an “inferential necessity.” In Boece, there are two necessities, “symple” (All men are mortal) and “condicionel” (Necessarily, if you know someone is walking, then she is walking), to use Boethius’s examples; Bradwardine, De causa Dei, bk. 3 ch. 28, 719. This is only an implicative necessity, as opposed to the absolute “necessity of the consequent thing (necessitas consequentis).”

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virtue of foresight decrees. If this be so, then prescience binds the [human] will.” The clerk’s conclusion can, however, be taken in a more controversial way. The language of “in virtue of foresight” could imply that human action, foreseen by God, binds God’s will and decrees.4 What is at stake for the opposing views, as is readily apparent, is God’s sovereignty, on the one hand, and human independence, on the other. Likewise, the controversial 1702 Harvard Quaestio of whether the immutability of God’s decree denies human free choice, raises the twin issues of (1) whether the ratio sufficiens (sufficient reason) for God’s knowledge of future contingents be will-based or knowledge-based; (2) whether God be the author of sin. Twisse says that some hold that the ratio sufficiens of God’s knowledge of all future contingents is that these events are simultaneously co-existent and ever present to God nunc aeternitatis (in an eternal now). But Scotus, says Twisse, holds that “determinationem voluntatis divinae” (the determination of the divine will) is the ratio sufficiens of God “knowing future states of affairs.”5 In other words, God’s will makes future, time-indexed states of affairs knowable to himself. Furthermore, on God’s relation to sin, praedefinitio divina (divine predefinition) “cannot be the ratio sufficiens of knowing universally future contingents,” since it “does not encompass all future contingent actions.” God, for instance, does not “prae-determinare voluntates humanas ad actus peccatorum (predefine sinful human action).”6 Given the proposition, “Whatever God wills, will be,” Twisse says that Scotus adds a conceptual point to the manner of knowing. Given the “posito decreto illo divinae voluntatis” (decree of the divine will), at that moment, the decree begins to have a “determinate vera” (determinate truth-value). However, before the decree of God’s will, whatever will be, has no determinate truth value. Thus, once the state of affairs is willed by the divine decree, God knows ‘whatever will be’ “non tantum in voluntate sua, sed etiam intuendo in seipsa veritatem illam” (not only in his will, but also in contemplating the truth value in himself).7 In sum, for Twisse, a state of affairs is future because “God willed it to be. For God works all things according to the counsel of his will; Ergo, from beginning to end, voluntas Dei antecedit praescientiam” (the will of

4 Dryden, “The Cock and the Fox,” lines 509–516, in Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, eds., The Poems of John Dryden: Volume Five: 1697–1700, Longman Annotated English Poets (London: Routledge, 2014), 353–54; Chaucer poses this dilemma explicitly in Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 4, lines 953–1078, The Riverside Chaucer; 550–52; The Portable Chaucer, 494–97. 5 William Twisse, Dissertatio de scientia media tribus libris absoluta (Arnhem: Jacobum à Biesium, 1639), 124. 6 Twisse, Dissertatio de scientia media tribus libris absoluta, 349. 7 Twisse, Dissertatio de scientia media tribus libris absoluta, 341.

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God precedes foreknowledge) and “is, consequently, the ratio sufficiens, as such, of the knowledge of the will.”8 Twisse is an important source for Samuel Willard (1640–1707), who presided over the 1702 Harvard commencement Quaestio. Willard is perhaps better known today for his “clinical study” of demonic possession during the Salem witch trials, the Third Church Boston minister, who was “erudite, diplomatic, clear-minded, discreet.”9 But as the acting vice-president of Harvard from 1701–1707, Willard was caught up in the controversy we have introduced, specifically, “whether the immutability of the decree denies the freedom of a creature.”10 Shortly after the Harvard commencement of 1702, George Keith (1638–1716), a Scottish missionary to New England, complained in a letter to Willard about what appeared to be a public defense of a position that not only denied human freedom of the will, but also made God to be the author of sin.11 A brief correspondence ensued between Willard and Keith in the years 1702–1704, the study of which can help us establish the historical form and scope of Reformed orthodoxy’s reply to the question of whether God be the author of sin. How do the Reformed thinkers build their case in defense of a previous concurrence of divine and human action, wherein humans, they claim, have no independence from God as first cause? On the face of it, three biblical texts, which often appear at the head of this locus, seem both to vindicate as well as vex the Reformed position. Those texts are, “God works all things according to the counsel of his will,” Ephesians 1:11, “For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure,” Philippians 2:13, and “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’” Acts 17:28.

8 Twisse, Dissertatio de scientia media tribus libris absoluta, 342. 9 Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), xiv, 331. For bioraphies on Willard, see Ernest Benson Lowrie, The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Seymour Dyken Van, Samuel Willard, 1640–1707: Preacher of Orthodoxy in an Era of Change (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972). 10 Samuel Willard, A Brief Reply to Mr George Keith: In Answer to a Script of His, Entitled “A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtfull Opinion, Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard” (Boston, 1703), 6; “An immutabilitas decreti tollat libertatem creaturae? Negat Franciscus Goodhue,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 633. [Henceforth: HCSC]. 11 Nathan Wölffel, “George Keith, 1638–1716,” Warwick Early Modern Forum 1450–1850. http:// www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/emforum/projects/brieflives/george_keith/ (accessed July 8, 2016).

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15.2 Latin Idiom Any approach to early modern thought on the topic at hand must understand the Latin idiom in historical context. Thus, when speaking of “the determination of the human will” one must be careful to avoid the anachronistic misstep of imposing upon the term the modern-day doctrine of “determinism,” which holds that “everything that happens is determined by a necessary chain of causation.” This definition only dates to the late–nineteenth century.12 In 1754, Jonathan Edwards defined “determining the will” as “causing that the act of the will or choice should be thus, and not otherwise.” Furthermore, he bases his position on the supposition that every effect has a cause, that the choice of the will is “directed to, and fixed upon a particular object.” Edwards is aware of the alternate view which claims that “the will determines itself.” But as we shall see below, he vigorously opposes a “self-determining will,” associating it with ‘the Arminians’, and rules out the possibility of the choice being otherwise.13 The need for reading Latin idiom with understanding is in further evidence when one is reading seventeenth-century theological English, as in the case of William Twisse, who writes in both Latin and English. For instance, Twisse latinizes the word “passion,” writing “Every being hath three passions denominating it … truth, … goodness, … and unity … All these are to be found in the being of God.” By passion he means “attribute,” or, “essential property,” which is one possible translation of the Latin passio, as in the English translation of the term as expressed in Scotus’s late-medieval Lectura I:39.14 Furthermore, the term “physical,” as used by Willard, and other Reformed authors, is a technical term that requires explanation.15 It often is used to express 12 s.v. “determinism” in Angus Stevenson, ed., Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1: 664. (Henceforth: SOED). 13 WJE 1:141. 14 A. Vos et al., trans., John Duns Scotus: Contingency and Freedom, Lectura I 39. Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, The New Synthese Historical Library 42 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 96–97, 100, 118–120, 172 (§39, §40, §50, §51, §83); Cf. s.v. passion, SOED, 2: 2117. (Definition III.9b: late 16th to early 18th meaning). 15 Heereboord distinguishes between the “moral” and the “physical” spheres of the faculty of the will. “By faulty, we understand a real or natural (facultas physicam seu naturalem), not an ethical or moral faculty (non ethicam seu moralem).” The physical level points to a freedom of choice “ad utrumlibet,” a freedom to alternate opposites, apart from attributing to the human faculty either good or evil, in Adriaan Heereboord, Meletemata Philosophica (Amsterdam: Joannem Ravesteinium, 1665), Collegium Ethicum, Disputationum Practicarum 11, De Libero Arbitrio,” thesis 6, 53. On this point, see Philip J. Fisk, Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will, New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 129. For a very helpful explanation of “physical” as opposed to “moral,” see the 1769 translator’s note in Petrus van Mastricht, A Treatise on Regeneration, ed. Brandon Withrow (Morgan: Soli Deo Gloria: 2002; New Haven: 1769; orig. 1699), 13–14n1; Holifield explains the use of a “physical” cause in terms of God’s

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aspects of God’s governing providence in concepts such as “physical influx,” “physical determination,” or “physical cause.” Its use assumes the reality of creaturely dependence upon God, as derived from the teaching of Acts 17:28, such that no human being can live and move apart from God and his sphere of action in all that comes to pass in this world. A physical cause, action, and operation effected by God does not effect a physical change in a human being, but it can result in a moral change. God’s physical act, qua act, upon a human being, is itself neither good or evil.16 God’s providential action which operates on the physical level of the reality of this world does things such as plant “natural affections” in human beings. But the exercise of those affections, for good or evil, does not have to do with physical change, but moral change. For a human to exercise his or her natural affections for something other than the good, is a defect of the human will. The defect and consequent human sin is not to be attributed to God, but to a “morally misplaced” human act of will.17 The sinfulness of human acts “terminates on the man himself.” The human physical act, qua act, is not a moral matter, but the deficient use of the faculty of the will is a moral matter. Sin “does not arise from the nature of the action, as it is an action, but from the moral deficiency of the agent.” Thus, God is not the “efficient cause of the sin which attends” the action.18

15.3 George Keith’s Refutation of Samuel Willard’s Dangerous Opinion The title of Keith’s letter to Willard states the problem he had with the thesis defended at commencement, namely, he believed it implied: That the fall of Adam, and all the sins of men, necessarily come to pass by virtue of God’s decree, and his determination both of the will of Adam, and of all other men, to sin.19

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grace moving the will “immediately.” He notes the metaphor of “infusion,” in E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 117. Willard, Reply, 21. Willard, Reply, 23. Willard, Reply, 24. George Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, an Independent Minister at Boston, & President at the Commencement in Cambridge in New-England, July 1, 1702. Viz. That the Fall of Adam, and All the Sins of Men, Necessarily Come to Pass by Virtue of God’s Decree, and His Determination Both of the Will of Adam, and of All Other Men, to Sin. Sent to Him in Latine Soon After the Commencement, and Since Translated Into English. By G. Keith, M.A. (New York, 1702), 1, in EB 1053.

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Keith’s main points of opposition to Willard have to do with the idea of human dependence upon and subordination to God, which he thinks results in a necessary determination of human choice. He proposes the following thesis: God, who is the First Cause of all created beings, doth not determine the will of man, so that he necessarily produceth any sinful action.20

Keith then argues five points to undermine his opponent’s position: (1) If God, as “cause of the cause,” so determines the will of humans that they necessarily sin, then God is the author of sin.21 (2) His opponents argue that “God is the physical cause of that sinful action, but not the moral cause thereof.” Furthermore, Keith finds unacceptable his opponent’s explanation that “God only determines the will of man to the material of the action, but not to the formal thereof.”22 (3) He rejects any argument that, in his mind, implies that God is “a law to himself.”23 (4) If God equally determines the human will to both virtue and vice, then, God is the author both of virtue and vice. But God is not the author of sin. Therefore, he is only the author of virtue. Keith also argues that if Adam’s fall “was necessary,” then he would be excused from guilt, since “necessity has no law.”24 (5) He recalls Willard asking the respondent, Goodhue, “to distinguish between necessary in the divided sense, and necessary in the compounded sense.”25 In the divided sense, Keith says his opponents “abstract” from the divine decree that Adam “could have not sinned.” The divided sense is a syntactical tool that allows the “hypothesis,” as Keith’s opponents argued, “that God had not decreed him to sin, and by virtue of that decree, had not determined him to sin.”26

15.4 Samuel Willard’s Reply My approach in this section is to identify and unpack the meaning of the key technical terms in Willard’s Reply to Keith, as they appear in four contested propositions. Proposition One: “That the fall of Adam, by virtue of God’s decree, 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, 3. Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, 3. Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, 3. Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, 4. Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, 5, 6. Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, 6. Keith, A Refutation of a Dangerous and Hurtful Opinion Maintained by Mr. Samuel Willard, 6.

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was necessary.”27 Willard explains that in Keith’s orginal letter, written in Latin, he had used the word “vi,” which Keith himself translated in his English version of the letter as, “by virtue of.” Willard reminds the reader that the Latin term vi, “always points at the cause” that produces an “effect.” But Willard does not invoke causality, which would imply that God’s decree causes human sin. Willard says that Keith should know that, technically speaking, the ‘decree’ is not to be confused with God’s work ad extra. There is a distinction between the decree as an “immanent act” of God, and God’s act ad extra as a “transient act.”28 Thus, on the hypothesis that “God decrees Adam’s fall,” Willard replies that while “it was necessary that he fall,” the logic is simply that of a “hypothetical necessity,” which is the same as a “necessity of infallibility;” but it is not an absolute necessity29 By the internal implication of the proposition, necessarily, if God decrees Adam’s fall, he will fall. For instance, Necessarily, If I am married to Cindy, then I am Cindy’s husband. But this is merely a necessity of the consequence of marriage. And whether I marry, is contingent, not necessary.30 Proposition Two: “That every free act of the reasonable creature, is, determined by God, so that whatsoever the reasonable creature acteth freely, it acteth the same necessarily.”31 For Keith, the notion of God physically determining the human will to one choice violates the notion of “absolute indifference.”32 At this level of divine-human concurrence and providence, Willard asserts the “dependence” of secondary causes upon God, the First Cause, “both as to being and operation.” There is no “independence” from the First Cause, “For in him we live and move and have our being,” Acts 17:28.33 Willard derives from Acts 17: 28 the notion that no entity, no human action, can escape God’s sphere of influence. Human virtue depends on the First Cause. However, God is not implicated in sinful human action. The physical sense of an act refers to the level of

27 Willard, Reply, 9. 28 Willard, Reply, 9. Cf. Willard writes that “immanent acts” do not affect humans. The decree belongs to this order of God’s acts, as does the “efficiency” of the decree. On the level of immanency, God can do and will more than he does will, hereby contrasting possibility with actuality. That which God does pass into futurity, belongs to the contingent, transient acts of God, in Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity in Two Hundred and Fifty Expository Lectures on the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism (Boston: Green and Kneeland, 1726), lecture 29, 91 and lecture 71, 250. 29 Willard, Reply, 9–11. 30 On the “necessity of infallibility,” see Fisk, Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition, 85–6, 153–4, 164, 287, 289, 301, 341, 359. See also, the Harvard 1759 Metaphysics thesis 3. “Necessarily, the infallibility of foreknowledge does not remove contingency and freedom from second causes,” in idem, 80. 31 Willard, Reply, 11. 32 Willard, Reply, 11. 33 Willard, Reply, 11, 12, 27.

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the “substrate matter” of an entity.34 The physical act, qua act, and the moral result of the act, are “nothing of kin.”35 God stands, as it were, asymmetrically behind good and evil acts. Evil, however, results from a deficiency in the human will. Let us suppose that God tempts a human being to sin. Without further nuance, both Willard and Keith agree that this would make God the author of sin. But although God advises and commands people to pray; “yet the prayer of the wicked is an abomination.”36 Keith fails to distinguish between the act itself, which God determines, and the human “obliquity” of the act.37 The act itself is on the physical level, the persuasion to sin on the moral level. If God were to tempt someone to sin, he would be implicated at both the physical and moral levels. Moreover, he would be implicated in both the material (the act itself) and the formal sense (the good or evil manner of action).38 Thus, the physical “substrate matter” of an action does not concern the sinfulness or goodness of the action. Neither is the physical “form of an action, as an action, the moral goodness or evil of it.” Rather, there is a sense in which the form is that which “individuates” one action from another.39 Proposition Three: “That the liberty of the will of man or angel, doth not consist in the indifferency to act, but only in a willing, or lubentia (willingness to act).40 Willard clarifies what he in fact said, namely: In lubentia rationis, primario et formaliter libertas sita est, that is, that liberty is primarily and formally rooted in the lubency or readiness of the will to act.41

Willard locates the “proper nature” of liberty in lubentia, generally interpreted by the term, “spontaneity.” The sense of this term is that the will “acts of its own accord, and is under no compulsion.”42 But in order to understand Willard’s full response to Keith’s comments on his use of the term lubentia, we first need to tease out the meaning of two technical terms that he uses in this section. These are, namely, the conceptual distinctions between actus primus (first act and actus secundus (second act).43 How do Reformed thinkers make use of the distinction between actus primus and actus secundus to help explain their position? Like other Reformed scholastic 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Willard, Reply, 20–21. Willard, Reply, 13. Willard, Reply, 38. Willard, Reply, 37. Willard, Reply, 21. Willard, Reply, 21. Willard, Reply, 14. Willard, Reply, 14. Willard, Reply, 14. Willard, Reply, 15.

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writers, Willard abstracts the notion of two acts from the will, qua will. The first act is related to the above discussion of God’s physical influx upon the human being, who has an underlying faculty of will. The first and second acts are distinct, but inseparable. For instance, in regeneration, the principle which God infuses in human beings, whereby he awakens and quickens them in the first act, is a physical act, without any active human cooperation, which then is completed in the human exercise of an act of will in a second act, in this case, in conversion. The enabling power for humans to act is given in the first act, but the realization of the act occurs in the second act.44 Two common examples in Reformed literature of a first and second act, separated in “order of time,” are the prophet Jeremiah and John the Baptist, called while yet in the mother’s womb (first act) and exercising faith later in life (second act).45 Proposition Four: “That God, who is the first cause of all created beings, doth not determine the will of man, so that he necessarily produceth any sinful action.”46 This is Keith’s counter-thesis to Willard’s main thesis. On the face of it, Willard finds Keith’s thesis to be self-contradictory, since Keith holds that some actions, qua actions, do not proceed from God as first cause. The problem, as Willard sees it, is Keith’s removal of divine “determination” of the human will. Willard argues that even what one calls “good” action is tainted with sinful motivation. The dilemma could be resolved, therefore, by way of the classic distinction between a “physical cause” and a “moral cause,” discussed above under proposition two.47 In sum, Willard points out that Keith argues nothing new beyond what “the Pelagians, Jesuits, Socinians, and Remonstrants” argued. Keith’s first “proof” is that “If God doth so determine the will of man, that he necessarily produceth any 44 Van Mastricht, A Treatise on Regeneration, ed. Brandon Withrow, 26–27; 37–42. These pages of the English translation correspond to pages 662–63 (theses 17–18), and to pages 665–666 (theses 25–26), in Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretico-Practica Theologia (Utrecht: Thomae Appels, 1699). Cf. the same use of actus primus and actus secundus in Francis Turretin, Eleventh Through Seventeenth Topics, vol. 2 of Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994), Sixth Question, 546–58; Cf. Ames’s Thesis 4: §3. “This infused grace does not properly determine the will except in the first act (in actu primo): such that liberty remains in the second act (ita ut libertas quaedam remaneat ad actum secundum); which although it [the will] infallibly follows by virtue of (vi) efficacious motion; it nevertheless does not remove all liberty or potency toward opposite acts (libertatem omnem tamen aut potentiam ad contrarium non tollit),” in William Ames, Rescriptio Scholastica et Brevis Ad Nicolaus Grevinchovii Responsum Illud Prolixum, Quod Opposuit Dissertationi de Redemptione Generali, et Electione Ex Fide Praevisa, Rev.Ed. (Harderwijk: Nicolai à Uvieringen, 1645), 136. Note: That the will in the second act “infallibly” follows the first act refers merely to a necessity of consequence. 45 For a fuller discussion, drawn from Heereboord’s Meletemata, see Fisk, Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition, 144–48. 46 Willard, A Brief Reply, 16. 47 Willard, A Brief Reply, 17.

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sinful action, it will follow that God is the author of sin.”48 “Philosophers” deny this to be universally true, and “logicians” order causes as “essentially subordinated” and “contingently subordinated,” writes Willard.49 Although God is the “prime cause” of the human will, he is not the author of sin, since sin proceeds not from “the will as will,” (or the will as such), but from the “accidental defect” of the will. Neither is sin, as such, an “entity,” which could flow from the will. Sin results from a defect of the will, its “deficiency.” Willard illustrates this distinction by a rider “riding a lame horse.” The rider whips up the horse to go. The lame movement “is not from the rider,” but from the horse’s “own lameness.”50

15.5 Willard’s principle of “The residue of the Spirit” Any approach to Willard and the classic-Reformed tradition must take into consideration the broad consensus concerning the contingency of all things outside God himself, and the primacy of his will. As Willard says, “the existence of a creature, is in itself a contingency.”51 Whatever God wills—each state of affairs that comes into existence—he passes “ex statu merae possibilitas” (out of a state of pure possibility) “in statum futuritionis” (into a state of futurition) by the decree of his will.52 There was no “natural necessity” upon God of “giving being to any thing out of himself.”53 Structurally speaking, apart from, or prior to his will, God does not “read” or see the “futurity” of any state of affairs or being in reality in his scientia simplicis intelligentiae (knowledge of simple intelligence). The reason is, as Willard explains, that God’s knowledge of simple intelligence “comprehends in it an innumerable company of possible entities, which never were, nor shall be.” In other words, God is not omnivolent; he does not will into existence all possible beings and states of affairs. Thus, since God, by the decree of his will, does not pass all possible states of affairs out of a state of possibility into a state of futurity, there remains an innumerable company of possible states of

48 49 50 51 52

Willard, A Brief Reply, 18. Willard, A Brief Reply, 19. Willard, A Brief Reply, 25. Willard, A Brief Reply, 30. On this common notion, see Stapfer, selected passages of which Jonathan Edwards transcribed into his “Controversies” Notebook, in Johann Friedrich Stapfer, Institutiones Theologicae Polemicae Universae, Ordine Scientifico Dispositae, in 5 vols (Tiguri (Zurich): Heideggerum et socios, 1757), vol. 1:107–8. §436. Willard states this same idea in his Compleat Body of Divinity, Lectures 32, 102 and 72, 256. 53 Willard, A Brief Reply, 30.

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affairs and beings in God’s knowledge of all possibles, the remaining possibility of which Willard attributes to, “the residue of the Spirit.”54 The significance of the contingency of all things outside God, and the primacy of God’s will, is that whatever contingent things God passes into futurition remain contingent, since the divine decree is immutable. Furthermore, Willard expresses a crucial idea of the classic-Reformed tradition, going back to Duns Scotus.55 That is, not only does Willard affirm that there is contingency in things, but he locates the cause and “the certain futurity of them” in God’s will: “He [God] could not therefore read this futurity in his own simple intelligence … He could not discover it in his omnipotency … this therefore must be entirely determined by his will.” As the Scripture says, writes Willard, God “works all things acccording to the counsel of his will.”56 In the next section, we stretch the historical canvas a bit broader. We attempt to understand developments in the interpretation and use of ratio sufficiens in the Enlightenment, by setting the principle against the background of classic-Reformed thought.

15.6 The Early Modern and Enlightenment57 Principle of Sufficient Reason The turn of the eighteenth century marked a transitional period in the language of orthodoxy and natural philosophy, with the development of the foundational “principle of sufficient reason,” “this great principle,” which G.W. Leibniz (1646– 1716) develops in De Rerum Originatione Radicale (1697), Théodicée (1710), and the Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence (1715–1716), published in 1717.58 In New 54 Willard, A Brief Reply, 30–31. Willard finds support for this idea in the biblical expression “residue of the Spirit,” found in Malachi 2:15 (the KJV and the Latin Vulgate “et residuum spiritus eius est”). For the same notion based on Mal. 2:15, see Samuel Willard, 1701 sermon “The checkered state of the Gospel Church, in “Tracts by Samuel Willard,” which includes the brief Reply to George Keith and Brief directions to a scholar, Z32w68, Beinecke (1701–35), 38– 39. Also, Lectures 21 and 22 of Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity, 66. 55 A. Vos et al., Scotus: Contingency and Freedom, Lectura I 39, 95–141 (§§38–61). 56 Willard, A Brief Reply, 30–31. 57 Given the historical nature of this study, it would be an anachronistic assumption to presume that Twisse, Willard, Edwards et al knew that they were using terms of “the Enlightenment,” since the term was not yet used in reference to a “philosophical movement” until the midnineteenth century: s.v. “the Enlightenment” in SOED 1: 837. 58 H.G. Alexander, ed. and comp., The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Opticks, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956; reprint 1998), 15–16, 95–96 (Leibniz’ Second and Fifth Papers) [Henceforth LCC]; cf. Twisse, De Scientia Media, (causa sufficiens), 62, 130, 447 and (principium sufficiens), 128, 341, 351; On “sufficient cause” in Calvin, see Richard A. Muller, Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom,

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England, Jonathan Edwards took up this “grand principle of common sense,” in his Freedom of Will (1754), after having come across it not only in the LeibnizClarke Correspondence, but also in Johann Friedrich Stapfer’s five volume Institutiones Theologicae Polemicae Universae, 1743–1747, large sections of which Edwards transcribed in his “Controversies” Notebook, Part V, “Predestination,” leading up to the writing of Freedom of Will.59 Stapfer, like Leibniz, claims the principle of sufficient reason to be foundational in proving the existence of God. He states the principle as follows: There is a ratio sufficiens for all states of affairs, why they are, the way they are, rather than otherwise. But there is no infinite progression of causes. A necessary being has in itself a sufficient reason for its existence. A contingent being can be otherwise than it is. The universe is a contingent being, and the sufficient reason for its being lies outside itself. There is therefore a being outside the universe, but it is not contingent, for if it were, then there would be an infinite regress a priori. “There is therefore a necessary Being who cannot not exist,” who has a sufficient reason in himself for why he creates the universe, why one way, and not another.60 When the principle of sufficient reason is taken together with the principle that states that God, by his will, passes states of affairs from a state of possibility to a state of futurition, the question is, asks Stapfer, whether the will of God alone is the sufficient reason for the futurition of the state of affairs?61 He gives a nuanced twofold reply: when God passes a possible state of affairs into futurition, the act of passing concerns the decree of his will. The sufficient reason herefore also concerns God’s intellect, and is to be sought first in potentia (in possibility), second in objecto (in the object), “which God represents to himself as the most fitting end.”62

15.7 Conclusion In Freedom of Will (1754), Edwards’s theory of knowledge begins with the Enlightenment principle of sufficient reason as the “grand principle of common sense … that what begins to be has a cause.” Like Stapfer, without this principle,

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Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 191–192. WJE 1:181–182. Stapfer, Institutiones, 1: 67–72 (§§270–296). Samuel Clarke’s Second Reply to Leibniz’s Second Paper states: “Tis very true, that nothing is, without a sufficient reason why it is, and why it is thus rather than otherwise. And therefore, where there is no cause, there can be no effect. But this sufficient reason is oft-times no other, than the mere will of God,” in LCC, 20. Stapfer, Institutiones, 1: 93 (§381).

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Edwards argues that there would only be intuitive evidence to prove God’s existence.63 Edwards argues that whatever begins to be has a cause and is not selfexistent. The universe begins to be. The universe has a cause. That First Cause must lie outside the universe. It is God, who is “self-existent and the first cause of all things;” he possesses the power of being in himself.64 In his unpublished “Controversies” Notebook, however, one sees a tension with his published view, since Edwards follows Stapfer in developing the idea that God’s decree is the sufficient reason for why events come to pass the way they do. Edwards writes that “the reason of the futurition of the thing … can be no other than God’s decree.” Edwards takes the classic-Reformed position, along with Stapfer, when he says something not found in Freedom of Will, namely, that in its own nature the event is “not necessary, but only possible.” It is “only in a state of possibility. There must be something to bring it out of a state of mere possibility, into a state of futurition, and this must be God only.” The reason lies not in the thing itself, for this would imply that it is “future prior to any decree.” Edwards hereby echoes Stapfer’s primacy of the divine decree of the will by which God passes possible states of affairs into futurition.65 This willing of an event to come to pass that was merely a possible state of affairs, implies the contingency of God’s willing states of affairs into existence. It assumes an ontology of genuine contingency. But unlike Stapfer and the Reformed tradition, Edwards denies any notion of contingency, at least in his mature published treatises, such as Freedom of Will. There he associates contingency with his opponents’ scheme of things, thereby turning away from his own tradition’s robust understanding of contingency. In his published Freedom of Will, Edwards appears to commit another act of ‘friendly fire’ by associating the perfectly useful principle ( well nuanced in Reformed orthodoxy) of “freedom ad utrumlibet” and “a self-determining power of the will” with a long line of development by opponents, which he names, the “Pelagians, semi-Pelagians, Jesuits, Socinians, Arminians.” These latter movements indeed extracted a robust response from Reformed Orthodoxy, which I have treated more fully elsewhere, but not a denial of a self-determining human and divine will. Edwards, however, does not attribute even a nuanced under63 WJE 1:181–183. On the same conclusion about the importance of the principle of sufficient reason (ratio sufficiens), see Stapfer, Institutiones, 1: 67–72 (§§270–296); Allen C. Guelzo, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); reprint Jonathan Edwards Classic Studies (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 70. 64 WJE 1:181, 377. 65 WJE 27. Also see Philip J. Fisk, “The Tension between Jonathan Edwards’s “Controversies” Notebook and Freedom of Will, on Whether Reality is Open and Contingent,” in The Global Edwards: Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress Held in Melbourne, August 2015, Australian College of Theology Monograph Series (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2017).

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standing of a self-determining will to God or human beings in Freedom of Will.66 Edwards articulates in Freedom of Will a view of God’s will—very much like Leibniz’s “Identity of Indiscernibles,” inferred from the principle of sufficient reason. In his dispute with Isaac Watts in Freedom of Will, Edwards takes up the Enlightenment principle of the identity of indiscernibles, coupled with the principle of sufficient reason, in support of his belief that there is a fitting and therefore necessary reason, though indiscernible, why God places two globes, both perfectly alike, “near one to another, one towards the right hand, and the other towards the left.” But each in a fixed position in the universe, rather than another, and crucially for Edwards, without the possibility of “transposition.” A contrary position is not possible, in Edwards’s view. He does not admit to a mere numerical difference, but nothing more. No, for him, God has a fitting reason and motive why the globe is placed as it is, and not otherwise.67 Concerning God’s will, Edwards says that (1) it is not “a self-determining power,” (2) it is “impossible” for God to will “otherwise,” than he does, (3) it is “determined by a motive of superior strength” and “superior fitness,” and (4) it is “necessary in all its determinations.”68 Edwards illustrates points (1) – (3) by saying that there cannot be “an infinite number of numerically different possible bodies, perfectly alike, among which God chooses, by a self-determining power, when he goes about to create bodies.”69 Here he denies that God has a self-determining power, by which God contingently determines what will come to pass, and why it should be one way, rather than another, although it can be otherwise, than it is. In this way he turns from his own tradition, at least in the published treatise, Freedom of Will. Point (2) leaves no room for the notion of logical possibilities, in the classic Reformed sense already mentioned in Twisse, Heereboord, Willard, and Stapfer. Neither does point (2) allow for a distinction between “possibles” in scientia simplicis intelligentiae, on the one hand, and “futurition” in scientia visionis, on the other, with God’s will playing the pivotal role in between (considered logically apart from both). Point (3) logically flows from (2), since God cannot will otherwise. The result is that Edwards, at least in his published Freedom of Will, suppresses the notion of God contingently willing to pass some states of affairs out of the realm of possibility into futurition.70 66 WJE 1:171, 203, 279, 289–90, 375, 391. 67 WJE 1:384–391. See fuller discussion in Fisk, Edwards’s Turn, 392–399. 68 WJE 1:375. On Leibniz and Edwards, see Editor Ramsey’s comments, WJE 1:114–115; Also see, Editor Alexander’s comments in LCC xxii–xxiii. 69 WJE 1:391. 70 It should be noted that Edwards’s title, Freedom of Will, is perhaps misleading to the modern reader, since he intended to debunk that supposed “freedom of will” and demonstrate, to the contrary, its moral necessity.

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Edwards’s exposition in Freedom of Will transforms his Reformed tradition from within, espousing the view that the sufficient reason why all things come to pass the way they do, and not otherwise, is based on a doctrine of superior fitness, which, as a result, denies an ontology of true contingency (the logical possibility that things can be otherwise than they are), an ontology which arguably belongs to the classic-Reformed line of thought, which we have seen above in Twisse, Willard, and Stapfer. Not only does Edwards develop the Enlightenment principle of sufficient reason into a law of causality, without contingency, but he also infers from this the doctrine of the moral necessity of why God wills what he wills. For Edwards, the greater the preferableness of choosing one state of affairs over another, the stronger the moral necessity to do so, and thus the freer God is. (For Edwards, this applies to human volition as well). Edwards is aware of the allegation that his view has affinities with the Stoics, whose views lead to atheism. But for Edwards, if this affinity is inferred from the principle of sufficient reason, so be it. After all, the Stoics were far from being atheists. They were “nearest akin to Christians.” On the contrary, it is those who hold to the notion of contingency that lead others to atheism.71 In a time when the general characterization of so-called Calvinists was that their doctrines make God the author of sin, the question before us is whether the charge leveled against Willard actually applies better to Edwards’s published statements on the issue than to Willard’s. Make no mistake, in the previous concurrence of divine and human willing, if asked if God is the “author of sin,” Edwards says that God is not. To say so would be “a reproach and blasphemy.” God is not the “actor of sin.” But Edwards does allow one to understand God as the “author of sin” in the sense of him being the one who “permits sins.” Nor, says Edwards, does God “will sin as sin.”72 Edwards, thus, believes that his doctrine of moral necessity clears himself from the alleged charge of making God the author of sin. Nevertheless, Edwards’s interpretation and application of the Enlightenment principle of sufficient reason—that there is a fitting reason and morally compelling necessity laid upon God, to will a state of affairs, without an alternate possibility at that divine moment of willing—taken together with the law of causality, and the principle of the identity of indiscernible, leads to the reasonable, but unfortunate, conclusion that Edwards’s turn away from his Reformed tradition, in this particular matter alone, represents a turn to an ontology of necessity, without contingency. I say unfortunate since there is so much good to say about Edwards’s life and ministry during the so-called Enlightenment. 71 WJE 1:420. 72 WJE 1:399, 409. The Reformed speak of a “previous” (God’s sovereign premotion in free causes) concurrence, the Arminians of a general concurrence. Edwards doesn’t use the term of art in Freedom of Will. On this distinction, see Fisk, Edwards’s Turn, 55, 127.

Christopher Woznicki (Fuller Theological Seminary)*

To Hell with the Enlightenment Jonathan Edwards and the Doctrine of Hell

In The Fear of Hell Piero Camporesi writes, “We can now affirm with some justification that hell is finished, that the great theatre of torments is closed for an indeterminate period, and that after almost 2,000 years of horrifying performances the play will not be repeated. The long, triumphal season has come to an end.”1 Camporesi’s aim in writing his monograph is to show how far society has come from the days when the majority of people believed in hell. By reviewing seventeenth-century treatises and sermons describing the horrors of hell he shows that this century served as a transitional period: the eighteenth-century Enlightenment would begin to erode how hell was traditionally conceived. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century American colonial pastor, found himself in this transitional period. His 1741 sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, is considered one of the most horrifying depictions of the eschatological future awaiting sinners ever described in the New World. In many ways the images portrayed in the Enfield sermon are as vivid as the pre-Enlightenment images of hell described by Camporesi. Given this similarity, Edwards seems to find more affinity with his pre-Enlightenment predecessors than with a number of his contemporaries. On the other hand, some have lauded Edwards’s theology as “enlightened.”2 Which assessment is correct? Is Edwards’s doctrine of hell best understood as vestige of the pre-Enlightenment tradition he was trained in or is it an expression of transitional enlightenment philosophy? One reason for questioning whether Edwards was “enlightened” is that during the height of the Enlightenment, conceptions of justice and the relationship between reason and revelation were changing. As a consequence of these changes some philosophers, * The author would like to thank Oliver Crisp, James Arcadi, Steven Nemes, Martine Oldhoff, and J.T. Turner for feedback that undoubtedly improved this essay. 1 Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), vi. Italics added for emphasis. 2 Robert Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3.

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theologians, and preachers began to revise the traditional doctrine of hell. Edwards, however, was not among these revisionists. Why does Edwards reject these Enlightenment revisions of the doctrine of hell? I suggest that Edwards’s primary reason for rejecting revisionist accounts of hell can be best explained by his teleological commitments. In making this argument I draw two conclusions: 1) The substance of Edwards’s doctrine of hell is well founded in traditional preEnlightenment theology and 2) Edwards’s manner of argumentation has more affinities with his fellow enlightenment contemporaries than with his PuritanReformed Orthodox predecessors. The plan of this essay is as follows. In part one, I outline some changes concerning the doctrine of hell that occurred during the Enlightenment. This sets the intellectual milieu in which Edwards wrote about hell. With these changes in mind, I treat two features of Edwards’s doctrine of hell: The Existence Thesis and the Retribution Thesis. I show that by affirming these features Edwards places himself firmly within the Puritan-Reformed tradition. In part two, I examine Edwards’s method for defending the Existence Thesis and the Retribution Thesis. I suggest Edwards’s view concerning God’s end in glorifying himself and humanity’s end in being useful for God’s glory best explain his defense of these two theses. This conclusion shows Edwards’s confidence in reason’s ability to prove theological claims, even apart from scriptural evidence. I conclude by explaining in what sense Edwards is a product of the Enlightenment.

16.1 Jonathan Edwards and the Changing Doctrine of Hell Philip Almond notes that prior to the English Restoration the traditional doctrine of hell was “socially, politically, and theologically correct.”3 By the middle of the 18th century, however, the doctrine was being publicly challenged and rejected by a number of significant figures. What is the traditional doctrine? According to Jonathan Kvanvig the traditional doctrine consists of four parts: The Existence Thesis: Those in hell exist forever in that state. The Anti-Universalism Thesis: At least some human persons will end up in hell. The No Escape Thesis: Once in hell, there is no possibility of escape. The Retribution Thesis: The justification and purpose of hell is to mete out punishment to those whose earthly lives and character deserve it.4

3 Philip Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145. 4 Jonathan Kvanvig, “Jonathan Edwards on Hell,” in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, eds. Paul Helm and Oliver Crisp (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), 1.

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While an in-depth examination of Edwards’s arguments for the four components of the traditional view would be worthwhile project, such a task is beyond the scope of this essay. Our focus will be on the Existence Thesis (ET) and the Retribution Thesis (RT), the reason being that 18th century objectors often conflated these two views. Before examining Edwards’s own thoughts regarding ET and RT, let us briefly survey the intellectual climate in which Edwards wrote and preached about hell.

16.2 Challenging the Existence and Retribution Theses One way ET was challenged was by questioning the meaning of the term “everlasting” in Matthew 25:46. Those who believed that “everlasting” meant without end argued that “everlasting” must have the same sense as when this term is applied to the ongoing blessedness of the saints in heaven, thus arguing that “everlasting” had a fixed meaning throughout scripture.5 Such arguments, however, were not exegetically convincing to many, even to those who believed in eternal punishments in hell. Henry More, for instance, suggests that sometimes “everlasting” had “the signification of long continuance, though not of everlastingness.”6 Thus, exegetically, even annihilation could reasonably be argued for. What could break the stalemate in these exegetical confrontations? Those who believed ET was false often believed that reason should be the arbiter. Isaac Barrow, the Cambridge mathematician, illustrates this appeal to reason. He believed that the eternal punishment view reflected, “a severity of justice far above all example of repeated cruelty in the worst of men.”7 Almond explains that Barrow arrives at this position based on three principles of biblical interpretation. The first is that “the most literal sense of Scripture has preference over any figurative or mystical sense.”8 The second is that, “Scriptural texts that are few in number and allegorical are to be reconciled to those that are greater in number and clearer in meaning.”9 The third is that “when the literal sense is disagreeable to piety or the nature of God, a mystical or spiritual sense is to be preferred.”10 With these three principles in hand Barrow argues that annihilation of the wicked 5 Almond, Heaven and Hell, 146. 6 Henry More, Annotations upon the Two Foregoing Treatises, Lux Orientalis, or, An Enquiry into the Opinion of the Prae-existence of Souls; and the Discourse of Truth… (London: 1682), 74. 7 Almond, Heaven and Hell, 148. 8 Isaac Barrow, Sermons and Fragments Attributed to Isaac Barrow D.D. (London, 1834), 210. Philip Almond notes that there is some dispute over the authorship of this text; Heaven and Hell, 192. 9 Barrow, Sermons and Fragments, 148. 10 Barrow, Sermons and Fragments, 148.

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was the correct position: the “everlasting fire” of Matthew 25 meant permanent destruction. The existence thesis is false. Thomas Burnet is another example of a thinker who appeals to reason instead of Scripture to oppose the existence thesis. He believed that the doctrine of eternal torment must be accepted only if it is “not opposed to the plainest and most invincible arguments.”11 According to D.P. Walker, Burnet teaches that reason reveals that eternal torments are not fitting of God’s wisdom and justice; so one ought to abandon the eternal punishment view of hell.12 In a highly illustrative passage Burnet attempts to show that an eternal hell is incompatible with God’s character, specifically God’s goodness and mercy. He makes this case by comparing the sufferings of early Christians at the hands of pagans to the eternal torment inflicted by God to the wicked in hell. Burnet states: We have read of the torments of the primitive Christians in the first ages of the church; and what the Sicilian and other Tyrants have invented; but these are soft to the torments of hell, and softer likewise as they are less durable and vehement; eternal grief has all the steps and gradations of the extreamest misery.13

Burnett concludes that the traditional doctrine of the everlastingness of hell makes God out to have the character of those who persecuted Christians. Burnet makes yet a stronger assertion; the doctrine puts God on par with pagan deities. He writes, We conceive the God of the Christians to be a wise and good Deity, not cruel and hostile to human nature; nor in his worship has he instituted anything barbarous, cruel, or inhumane; he neither wounds nor rends the flesh, nor like Moloch, pulls tender infants from their mother’s breasts into his burning arms.14

Some thinkers, like Barrow and Burnet, attempted to show that eternal torments in hell were incompatible with the character of God, other thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Matthew Tindal, Samuel Bourn, William Whiston, and Samuel Clarke opposed the retributive features of hell.15 Hobbes, for example expresses the difficulty in believing “that God who is the Father of Mercies… should punish men’s transgressions without any end of time, and with all the extremity of torture that men can imagine and more.”16 Tindal believed that the kind of 11 Thomas Burnet, Of the State of the Dead, Vol. 2, transl. M. Earbery, 2nd ed., (London: 1728), 80–1. 12 D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 163. 13 Burnet, Of the State of the Dead, Vol. 2, 85. 14 Burnet, Of the State of the Dead, Vol. 2, 81. 15 Almond, Heaven and Hell, 150–152. 16 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 1, ed. G.A.J Rogers and Karl Schuhmann (New York: Continuum, 2005), 497.

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retribution attributed to God in the traditional doctrine of hell made God to “resemble the worst of Beings…[resembling] downright Demonism.”17 Writers like Franciscus van Helmont and David Hume, on the other hand, were especially concerned with the aspect of RT that argued for the necessity of eternal punishment based on the status of the one whom sin had been committed against. John Ray is representative of this position. Ray writes, “God is an infinite person, and sin being an injury and affront to him, as being a violation of his law an infinite punishment must be due to it.”18 This view is often labeled the “status principle.” Van Helmont opposes the status principle by pointing out that “on the principle of the infinite difference between the sinner and God, then the least sin merited the same degree of punishment as the greatest, and this, he implied, was contrary to justice.”19 Thus van Helmont provides an reductio type argument against the status principle. Hume argues similarly, stating that “punishment according to our conception, should bear some proportion to the offence. Why then eternal punishment for the temporary offences of so frail a creature as man?”20 Archbishop Tillotson argues along the same lines. He concedes that in one sense the status principle is correct; fault is heightened by the dignity of the person offended, yet not to an infinite degree.21 If all sins merited infinite punishment, Tillotson reasons, the all sins would be equal. This, he believed, was absurd.22 This brief overview of arguments against ETand RT by enlightenment thinkers shows that the intellectual milieu in which Edwards found himself was rapidly changing. Leading intellectual figures of his day denied elements of the traditional doctrine of hell; but by defending ET and RT, Edwards stood in opposition to prevailing trends.

17 18 19 20

Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (London, 1730), 78. Cited in Almond, Heaven and Hell, 154. Almond, Heaven and Hell, 155. David Hume, “Of the Immortality of the Soul,” in Immortality, ed. Paul Edwards (Amherst: Prometheus Books), 137. 21 Almond, Heaven and Hell, 155. 22 Almond, Heaven and Hell, 155.

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16.3 Edwards and his Puritan-Reformed Predecessors on the Existence Thesis Edwards believed that those in hell exist forever in that state; he denied annihilationism.23 One finds this in a number of his works but it is clearly displayed in two of his sermons: The Eternity of Hell Torments and That the Torments of Hell Will be Eternal. The “doctrine” he attempts to prove in each sermon are, “The misery of the wicked in hell will be absolutely eternal,” and “That the torments of hell will be eternal,” respectively.24 In these sermons, Edwards enters into Enlightenment debates concerning the meaning of the term “everlasting.” In one sermon he specifically refers to Archbishop Tillotson, whom he recognizes as prominent “figure among the new-fashioned divines,” and addresses his view that punishment is temporary.25 Edwards also refers to some who have said, “only a long time was signified” by the term “everlasting” and to others who say that the torments of hell “shall not be absolutely eternal, but only of a very long continuance.”26 While this phrase is commonly found in annihilationist arguments, Edwards likely encountered the phrase in the writings of authors like Henry More. Like More, he recognizes that “the term [everlasting] is not always in Scripture used to signify eternity.”27 Sometimes everlasting “means as long as a man lives.”28 Other times it means the length of the continuance “of the state and church of the Jews.”29 But in relation to hell, Edwards says, the term is term is used to signify “proper eternity.” Thus, Edwards concludes, “It is said, not only that punishment shall be forever, but forever and ever.”30 In these two sermons Edwards makes a number of arguments based on the logic of scripture to defend ET. Here, I list four that exemplify the kind of scriptural arguments he makes.31 First, he argues that “Scripture everywhere represents the punishment of the wicked, as implying very extreme pains and 23 It should be noted that the existence thesis does not imply eternal torments, but eternal torments implies the existence thesis. Edwards held to the stronger view in which existence included eternal conscious torment. 24 WJEO 54:509, This sermon has also been published as The Eternity of Hell Torments. WJEO 45:152. Also known as, That the Torments of Hell Will Be Eternal. [For edited versions of these texts see: William Nichols, Hell’s Torments: Jonathan Edwards on Eternal Damnation (Ames: International Outreach, 2006). 25 WJEO 54:509. Against the temporal punishment view Edwards states, “There never will be an end to their torment by any change or alteration in their state. Their state will never be changed for the better.” WJEO 45:44. 26 WJEO 45:152; 54:509. 27 WJEO 54:509. 28 WJEO 54:509. 29 WJEO 54:509. 30 WJEO 54:509. 31 According to my estimate there are at least ten different arguments presented in “THWE.”

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sufferings.”32 He reasons that this shows that annihilation cannot be true, as people who are annihilated have no sense of pain or suffering. Second, he shows that “it is agreeable both to Scripture and reason to suppose that the wicked will be punished in such a manner that they shall be sensible of the punishment they are under.”33 This is inconsistent with annihilation says Edwards, for if they are annihilated, “they will never know that it is inflicted.”34 Third, Edwards demonstrates that “Scripture teaches that the wicked will suffer different degrees of torment.”35 This Edwards plainly says cannot hold true if God annihilates the wicked.36 Finally, Edwards argues that the doctrine of atonement disproves annihilation. He assumes that the suffering of Christ on the cross is proportionate to the suffering that sinners would have received had Christ not paid their penalty for sin. With this assumption in place, he reasons that, “Christ when he suffered in our stead, he did not suffer annihilation for a while; but he suffered pain and torment.”37 In other words, if annihilation were the penalty for sin then Christ would have been annihilated; but Christ was not annihilated, so annihilation cannot be the penalty for sin experienced by those in hell. Upon establishing, on Scriptural grounds, that the existence of those in hell is eternal, Edwards proceeds to speak of the goods obtained by the eternal sufferings of the wicked in hell. He lists four “good ends herby obtained” in the two sermons. The first good end is that God “vindicates his injured majesty.”38 When sinners offend his majesty and fail to give God his due, God vindicates his majesty by showing how dreadful it is to offend it. The second end obtained is that “God glorifies his justice.”39 God glorifies his justice by showing that he is “a just governor of the world.”40 His retributive justice appears “strict, exact, awful, and terrible, and therefore glorious.”41 The third end obtained is that God “indirectly glorifies his grace on the vessels of mercy.”42 This is because those who are saved see the misery God has saved them from and thank God for the grace he has given to them. The fourth end obtained is that “the sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever.”43 In seeing the wicked suffer in hell the saints will

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

WJEO 54:509. WJEO 54:509. WJEO 54:509. WJEO 54:509. WJEO 45:152. WJEO 45:152. WJEO 45:152; 54:509. WJEO 45:152; 54:509. WJEO 45:152; 54:509. WJEO 45:152; 54:509. WJEO 45:152; 54:509. WJEO 45:152; 54:509.

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“prize his [God’s] favor and love exceedingly the more. So, they will be so much the happier in the enjoyment of it.”44 In affirming ET, specifically, the everlasting nature of hell’s torments, Edwards was firmly in line with his Puritan-Reformed predecessors. Consider the Westminster Confession of Faith, a document Edwards explains he could affirm.45 The confession states, The end of God’s appointing this day [the day of the Last Judgement] is for the manifestation. . . of His justice, in the damnation of the reprobate who are wicked and disobedient. . . the wicked who know not God, and obey not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.

Like Edwards’s own theology, this confession affirms the eternal torments of hell. It also affirms that judgment’s end is manifesting God’s glory through his justice and mercy. Consider also Petrus van Mastricht, a Dutch Reformed theologian whose work Edwards greatly admired.46 In Liber Quartus, Caput Quartum, (De Poenâ Statu Peccati) of Theoretico-Practica Theologia Mastricht writes against the Socinian view that the death of the wicked is a death of non-existence (mortem non-existentiae).47 Thus, he affirms ET. Additionally, Mastricht states that those in hell experience both the penalty of the eternal loss of communion with God (aeternam privationem omnis communionis cum Deo) and conscious torment which is without cessation or interruption (durationis nullâ cessatione aut intermission).48 Both of these penalties, Edwards seeks to show, entail ET. Finally, Francis Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology Edwards also admired, affirms the eternal torments of hell. He states that the wicked will be cast into hell, “where they must be tormented forever with the devils.”49 Against the position of the Socinians Turretin writes that, “it ought to be certain and constant that it is not a mere annihilation.”50 One of Turretin’s argument against annihilation is similar to Edwards’s in The Eternity of Hell’s Torments. Recall, Edwards argued that scripture’s depiction of the suffering of the wicked necessarily excludes annihilation. Turretin says, Expressions which exhibit some idea (but altogether imperfect) of the unspeakable tortures [the wicked] will suffer in the soul as well as body… More than sufficiently 44 45 46 47

WJEO 45:152; 54:509. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale, 2003), 362. See Edward’s letter to Joseph Bellamy. WJEO 16: 217. Peter van Mastricht, Theoretico-Practica Theologia (Utrecht: Ex officinâ Thomae Appels, 1699), 379. 48 Mastricht, Theoretico-Practica Theologia, 376. 49 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. 3, trans. George Giger (Philipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1997), 604. 50 Turretin, Institutes, 605.

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evince the falsity of the figment of those who make the punishments of the wicked to consist of annihilation and nonexistence. For to what end would they be described by the most dreadful pains and torments if it is to be a mere punishment of loss or annihilation?51

Such examples—which could be multiplied—serve to show that Edwards unlike a number of his Enlightenment contemporaries, stood firmly within the PuritanReformed tradition regarding the everlasting existence of the wicked in hell.

16.4 Edwards and his Puritan-Reformed Predecessors on the Retribution Thesis Besides affirming ET, Edwards also believed the nature of the punishment that sinners received in hell was retributive. This was required by God’s justice. Edwards’s argument for the necessity of retributive justice can be found in Miscellany 779. There he states that “justice requires that sin be punished, because sin deserves punishment.”52 The punishment of sin, however, is not merely a divine requirement, it is a requirement of justice in general. Even among humans, “none will deny that there is such a thing in some cases as the desert or merit of a crime, its calling for or requiring punishment.”53 If this is something that every person can recognize, how much more is it true for God? Edwards explains, Seeing therefore t’is requisite that sin should be punished, as punishment is deserved and just, therefore the justice of God obliges him to punish sin: for it belongs to God as the supreme Rector of the universality of things to maintain order and decorum in his kingdom…That perfection of his nature whereby he is disposed to do this is his justice; and therefore his justice naturally disposes him to punish sin as it deserves.54

In addition to appealing to the necessity of punishment on the grounds of God’s justice Edwards appeals to God’s holiness; the attribute under which justice operates.55 According to Edwards, punishment could be fulfilled in one of two ways. First, Christ could suffer the full punishment that sinners deserved. In doing so Christ would have to offer to God something “that was fully and completely equivalent to what we owed to divine justice for our sins.”56 Second, those who do not accept Christ as their substitute, can pay the penalty for their sins in hell. 51 52 53 54 55 56

Turretin, Institutes, 605. WJEO 18:434. WJEO 18:434. WJEO 18:434. WJEO 18:434. WJEO 20:375.

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Besides believing that retributive justice requires the punishment of sin, Edwards also believed that God must punish sin or else God would fail to exercise his rectoral justice—the aspect of divine justice whereby God rightly governs the cosmos in accordance with his moral law—and his role as the moral governor of the universe would fall into disrepute. Edwards argues that as the “supreme regulator or Rector of the universality of things” God must maintain the honor of his own glory and he must keep justice among his creatures.57 For these reasons, the demands of retributive justice and rectoral justice, God is required to punish sin. But what is the nature of this punishment and what is its extent? In describing the nature of punishment, Edwards follows his Puritan-Reformed predecessors. Reformed divines often distinguished between punishments of loss (poena damni) and of sense (poena sensus). William Ames, in the Marrow of Theology—a text Edwards read at Yale—says that there are two parts of punishment: “poena damni vel privativa, poena sensus vel positiva,”58 The deprivation consists of the “boni foelicis.”59 The punishment of sense consists of a “subjectione ad miseriam,” and does not consist of annihilation.60 Turretin makes this point arguing that “the Scriptures describe these punishments now privatively and negatively by the removal of all good, then positively and affirmatively.”61 The punishment of loss consists of separation from God and the privation of the beatific vision, light, joy, glory, felicity, and of “all good things of whatsoever kind they may be.”62 The punishments of sense are also manifold. They include “pain and tortures,” accompanied by “torments, by groans and griefs, by cries and wailings by weeping and gnashing of teeth… by the unquenchable fire and other things of like nature.”63 Like Ames and Turretin before him, Edwards describes both the punishments of loss and the punishments of sense. In his sermon, That the bodies of Wicked men as Well as Their Souls will be Punished Forever in Hell, Edwards shows that those in hell “suffer the loss of all bodily enjoyments” and of “all those external

57 Oliver Crisp and Kyle Strobel, Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 141. 58 William Ames, Medulla Theologica (Amsterdam: Apud J. Janssonium, 1634), 61. Edwards possessed a copy of the 1634 edition of the Medulla Theologica. [The punishment which is a loss or the part of deprivation, and the punishment which is a matter of consciousness, or the positive part.] For an English translation see: William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. John Eusden (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 119. 59 Ames, Medulla Theologica, 59. [Good of happiness.] 60 Ames, Medulla Theologica, 61. [Subjection to misery.] 61 Turretin, Institutes, 605. 62 Turretin, Institutes, 605. 63 Turretin, Institutes, 605.

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things” that they once had.64 They also “suffer the loss of all heavenly glory which they might have enjoyed.”65 Besides these punishments of loss, sinners also experience positive punishments. Thus, “There will be the greatest agonies of horror and of mind.” God inflicts these punishments on both the body and the soul. What are these punishments? Edwards lists several: 1) The deformation of the body and soul, 2) The torment of pain in literal fire, and 3) God’s wrath on hearts, bowels, heads, eyes, tongues, hands, nerves, sinews, and feet.66 These punishments, Edwards claims, are experienced literally in the body, and are experienced metaphorically with respect to the soul.67 Concerning the extent of the punishments of hell Edwards did not significantly differ from figures like Turretin. In his treatment of the features of infernal punishments Turretin explains that scripture teaches that there is inequality according to the types of sins committed. Turretin reasons that “some sins are more heinous than others. Therefore, the punishments also ought to be unequal, that God may render to each one his due and according to his works.”68 This inequality however does not hold with regard to the duration of the punishments. Thus, Turretin writes, “the infinite demerit of sin is visited as it were with a punishment infinite in duration.”69 Edwards agrees with Turretin regarding the degrees and duration of punishment. Concerning the degrees of punishment, Edwards teaches that this varies according to the number of actual sins, the degree of aggravation, the heinousness of sins (e. g. murder is more heinous than theft), how contrary they are to the love of God and neighbor, if one violates one’s convictions of conscience, and the circumstances under which the sin was committed (e. g. whether one is an “ignorant heathen” or whether one sits “under the preaching of the gospel”).70 The torments that sinners experience are proportioned according to these factors. The duration of these torments, however is never ending. Edwards reasons that the obligation to love, honor, and obey 64 Jonathan Edwards, “That the Bodies of Wicked Men as Well as Their Souls Will be Punished Forever in Hell,” in The Torments of Hell: Jonathan Edwards on Eternal Damnation, ed. William C. Nichols (Ames: International Outreach, 2006), 49. 65 Edwards, “Bodies,” 50. 66 Edwards, “Bodies,” 50–51. Although Edwards concludes that the fires of hell are literal, he believes it is orthodox to believe that they may be figurative. See Jonathan Edwards, “The Wicked Hereafter Will Be Cast into a Furnace of Fire,” in The Torments of Hell: Jonathan Edwards on Eternal Damnation, ed. William C. Nichols (Ames: International Outreach, 2006), 29. 67 Edwards, “Bodies,” 46. 68 Turretin, Institutes, 606. 69 Turretin, Institutes, 607. 70 Jonathan Edwards, “That the Punishment and Misery of Wicked Men in Another World Will Be in Proportion to the Sin that They are Guilty Of,” in The Torments of Hell: Jonathan Edwards on Eternal Damnation, ed. William C. Nichols (Ames: International Outreach, 2006), 68–70.

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God is infinite, therefore sin which is the violation of this obligation is a violation of an infinite obligation. Thus, “sin being an infinite evil, deserves an infinite punishment.”71

16.5 Reasoning About Hell In addition to being found in his sermons, Edwards’s defense of ET can be found in Miscellany 279.72 Edwards’s argument in Miscellany 279 can be reconstructed as follows: 1) If the elect in heaven are to be happy and thankful they must have a lively sense of God’s love, justice, and holiness. 2) If the elect have a lively sense of God’s love, justice, and holiness, it is necessary that there be a state of affairs that induces a lively sense of God’s love, justice, and holiness. 3) Seeing God punish the wicked necessarily (and most fittingly) induces a lively sense of God’s love, justice, and holiness. 4) The elect in heaven are in fact happy and thankful. It follows that, 5) There is some state of affairs that induces a lively sense of God’s love, justice, and justice, namely the punishment of the wicked. According to Edwards, the reason that seeing God punish the wicked induces a lively sense of God’s love is that, when the elect see the wicked they get a “lively sense of the opposite misery” that would have been their destiny had God not elected to rescue them from his wrath. Additionally, seeing God punish the wicked induces a sense of thankfulness to God because “he chose them out from the rest to make them thus happy” and because they realize that “God did not make them such vessels of wrath.”73 Up until this point Edwards’s argument only shows why God would punish the wicked. It does not yet show why this punishment will be eternal. The following argument is implicit in Miscellany 279, and leads to the conclusion that “the misery of the damned will be eternal,” thus fulfilling ET:74 6) If the elect are eternally happy then they are happy at time1, time2, time3, and so on ad infinitum. 71 72 73 74

WJEO 54:509. WJEO 13:379. WJEO 13:379. WJEO 13:379.

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7) If the elect are happy at time1, time2, time3… time∞ then there is a most fitting state of affairs that necessarily induces a lively sense of God’s love, and justice, namely the punishment of the wicked, at time1, time2, time3… time∞. 8) The saints are eternally happy. It follows from 6, 7, and 8 that 9) There is some state of affairs that necessarily induces a lively sense of God’s love, and justice, namely the punishment of the wicked, at time1, time2, time3… time∞. This particular argument for ET is not based on justice, rather it is based on God’s ultimate end which is the communication of his glory. God, according to Edwards, is a communicative being.75 This means that God essentially inclines to communicated himself.76 When God communicates himself, he communicates his own glory. There are two ways by which God communicates himself ad extra. First, God appears to the saints in their understanding. Second, God communicates himself to their heart. In doing so the saints rejoice, delight, and find joy in God’s communication of himself. Thus, Edwards explains that “God is glorified not only by his glory being seen, but by its being rejoiced in, when those that see delight in it.”77 The key word here is rejoice. According to Miscellany 279, when the saints see the eternal punishment of the wicked in hell, they not only understand, they rejoice in God’s goodness. Rejoicing in God’s goodness the saints glorify God, and in turn they return God’s ad extra communication of his glory. The end result is that God’s ultimate end as well as humanity’s end – the glorification of God – are both fulfilled. Edwards’s argument for RT is also based on understandings of God and humanity’s ends. In a sermon on Ezekiel 15:2–4, Edwards teaches that “If men bring forth no fruit to God, they are wholly useless, unless in their destruction.”78 In order to prove this doctrine Edwards makes four moves. First, he argues that it is evident that they can only be two ways that a person can be useful, either in acting or in being acted upon. Second, a person can only be actively useful by bringing forth fruit to God. Third, if a person does not bring fruit to God, this person must be passively useful to God. Fourth, a person can only be passively

75 76 77 78

WJEO 13:410. WJEO 13:277–278. WJEO 13:495. WJEO 49.332. This sermon has also been published as “Wicked Men Useful in their Destruction Only.”

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useful to God by “being destroyed.”79 Thus even in their lack of fruitfulness they are useful to God’s ends. In his discussion of this sermon, David Reiter highlights the fact that the justification for this first move is the recognition that a person can help promote an end or goal in two ways. A person can either act intentionally in order to bring about that goal or they can help bring about that goal without acting intentionally.80 What goal does Edwards have in mind? Initially he states the goal is to “bring forth fruit to God.” Later, however, Edwards elaborates upon this goal, stating that bringing fruit to God is to be understood as “serving God, and living to his glory.” This goal Edwards says, “was the very design and aim of the Author of man, this was the work for which he made him, viz. to serve and glorify his Maker.”81 Here, we notice, like the argument in Miscellany 279, the justification for an aspect of the traditional doctrine of hell is also considered in light of the end that is God’s glory. Another argument for RT, specifically the status principle, can be found in Miscellany 779. There Edwards argues that “God should punish all sin with infinite punishment; because all sin, as it is against God, is infinitely heinous, and has infinite demerit.”82 The reason that sin should be infinitely punished, Edwards says is because “sin casts contempt on the infinite glory and excellency of God.”83 When persons sin they communicate that God “is a despicable being, not worthy to be honored or feared.” God’s proper reaction to sin, therefore, is to vindicate his glory. God does this is by means of satisfaction. Satisfaction can occur only by an action which is opposite and equivalent to the contempt shown to God. Satisfaction can be made either by “an equivalent punishment, or an equivalent sorrow and repentance.”84 No person is capable of the second, so “sin must be punished with an infinite punishment.” This punishment can be paid by a substitute (i. e. Christ) or by the sinner herself (i. e. in hell). In this section we examined three arguments Edwards provided for elements of the traditional doctrine of hell. Two things are apparent from these arguments. First, the rationale is teleological. The destruction of sinners in hell leads the saints actively to glorify God for his justice and mercy and their destruction also allows sinners passively to fulfill their God given end of glorifying God. Additionally, Edwards believed that the reason sinners experience infinite punish79 By “destroyed” Edwards does not mean annihilation. 80 David Reiter, “Behold, It is Cast into the Fire for Fuel: Jonathan Edwards on the Usefulness of the Wicked,” in Philosophical Approaches to the Devil, eds., Benjamin McCraw and Robert Arp (New York: Routledge, 2016), 99. 81 WJEO 49.332. 82 WJEO 18:435. 83 WJEO 18:440. 84 WJEO 18:439.

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ment in hell was because sin casts contempt on the infinite glory of God. Thus, sinners deserve hell because they have failed teleologically: they have not accomplished their God given end. By punishing sinners, God acquires satisfaction for the glory that has been denied to him. Second, Edwards does not always appeal to Scripture to prove the doctrine. Even though Edwards often used Scripture to argue for the traditional doctrine of hell (as seen in part 1), Edwards also believed that the doctrine could be established by reason. He states as much in The Eternity of Hell Torments. In the first half of the sermon he shows how “the truth of the doctrine [is] established by reason.”85 The rest of the sermon, prior to the Application, is dedicated to proving the doctrine from scripture. Those familiar with his other writings should not find this surprising. The End of Creation, for example is organized in the same way; the first section establishes his doctrine via reason, the second section establishes it via scripture. His defense of the Trinity also displays his confidence in reason’s ability to deduce theological truths. In Miscellany. 94 Edwards writes, “I think that it is within the reach of naked reason to perceive that there are three distinct in God, each which is the same, three that must be distinct.”86 Edwards did not think that reason alone could explain the Trinity, nevertheless, he did believe that it could establish the doctrine.87 The same holds true for Edwards’s understanding of hell. While the doctrine of hell, particularly the nature of the torments of hell, is not explainable by reason alone, ETand RT can be established by reason without use of scripture.

16.6 Edwards the Enlightenment Theologian? William Dodwell, the 18th century English cleric, maintained that reason cannot prove the eternity of hell’s torments. But in Scripture, he argued, eternal torment “is taught in the plainest and most express terms.”88 Dowdwell’s claim is illustrative of the way that defenders of the traditional doctrine of hell approached the topic. It also serves as a foil to those Enlightenment thinkers who attempted to examine the traditional doctrine from the principles of reason. In one sense, Edwards stands closer to the latter group than the group represented by Dowdwell. Henry May distinguishes among four categories of Enlightenment thought that influenced American thought in the 1700’s and 1800’s.89 One, that of 85 86 87 88

WJEO 54:509. WJEO 13:256–257. WJEO 21:134. William Dodwell, The Eternity of Future Punishment Asserted and Vindicated (Oxford: 1743). Cited in Almond, Heaven and Hell, 146. 89 Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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Moderate or Rational Enlightenment is represented by British figures like Newton and Locke. These moderates believed that “rational faculties are innate to all humankind, and through their proper exercise it is possible to shed valuable light on the natural world, human nature, morality, and the providence of God.”90 Those things revealed by reason would “complement the truths revealed in sacred Scripture.”91 Rhodri Lewis argues that this early phase of the enlightenment characterized reason as “the ability to know something of God… without the benefit of revelation, or of the divine logos on which the Christian religion was founded.”92 Locke, Lewis claims, is representative of this line of thinking. According to Locke, the relationship between reason and theology is intrinsically related: “the practice of using reason for the purpose of theological enquiry is essential to the proper worship of God.”93 Given his early enamorment with Locke, it should come as no surprise that Edwards would approach the task of theological enquiry in a manner similar to the English philosopher. When it came to the traditional doctrine of hell, Edwards believed that reason would complement the truths revealed in Scripture; but not only that, he believed it could demonstrate the doctrine apart from Scripture. Gerald McDermott’s analysis of Edwards’s relation to the Enlightenment explains why this should come as no surprise. Edwards, McDermott writes, shared the view with Enlightenment thinkers that “the truths of faith and reason were one.”94 At one point early in his career Edwards even believed that natural reason could adjudicated differences over God’s character.95 Given our observations concerning his approach to hell it makes sense why McDermott would say that Edwards “was a child of the Enlightenment”; both the method and content his writings display a mind shaped by Enlightenment sensibilities.96 We conclude by coming back to the question: Is Edwards’s doctrine of hell best understood as vestige of the pre-Enlightenment tradition he was raised in or is it an expression of transitional enlightenment philosophy? The answer, like Edwards himself, is complex. The content of Edwards’s doctrine of hell is substantially shaped by his Puritan and Reformed predecessors; however, his defense of the retributive nature of the everlasting punishments of hell is carried out from within the framework of Enlightenment thought. To some Edwards’s defense of 90 Rhodri Lewis, “The Enlightenment,” in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 99. 91 Lewis, “The Enlightenment,” 99. 92 Lewis, “The Enlightenment,” 99. 93 Lewis, “The Enlightenment,” 101. 94 Gerald McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 219. 95 McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, 221. 96 McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, 218.

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the traditional doctrine represents a dark side of the Enlightenment. But Edwards would have seen it differently. His defense of hell cast light on the most fundamental feature of reality: the glory of God.

Matthew Everhard (Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church)

Jonathan Edwards: An Intellect Precariously Astride Two Diverging Epochs

17.1 Introduction Jonathan Edwards may be viewed as a man who stood astride two great eras, as though straddling a pair of giant, shifting, tectonic plates. Under his right foot rested the historical Reformed faith and the Colonial convictions of his heritage; high-orthodox traditional Puritanism in its most refined and mature manifestations. Under his left foot, breaking away from all that he had been tacitly raised to assume, was the Enlightenment movement. In this, science, technological progress, and vast new avenues of human learning slowly, but steadily broke away from the surety of his grandfather’s world. To change the metaphor, Jonathan Edwards clung like a white-knuckled passenger, half-way on, and dangling hanging half-way off, a departing train. He gripped tightly and enthusiastically on the handles of the rapidly departing shuttle, even if he was somewhat unsure of its final destination. Yet simultaneously, he held firm; digging his intellectual heal inflexibly in the unmoving ground under the tracks below. As for the terra firma in which he dug his heals stubbornly, Edwards sought to preserve his place as the direct heir to the Calvinistic foundation upon which his forefathers had also stood. There, one could be sure to rest upon a worldview in which God was radically central, the belief the Church held the supreme position of teaching authority in Colonial society, and the conviction the great theological questions of the age had long been answered and precisely refined. After all, it had been some 100 years, since the Assembly of Divines meeting at Westminster penned the definitive documents of the late Reformation Era.1 1 Edwards himself did not subscribe to the Westminster Standards in any formal way, as he was not required to do so for a Congregational ordination (contrary to Presbyterian practices which require either strict or more flexible forms of subscription), but the theological convictions ascribed in those documents were assumed as a matter of course for most Calvinistic, Puritan congregations and households, regardless of whether they were Presbyterian or Congregational. Edwards would later write in a letter that he would, theoretically, have no problem subscribing if required to do so. He said in a letter to John Erskine, dated July 5, 1750,

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True to form, Edwards saw himself as both heir and defender of this refined theological orthodoxy, bequeathed to him by the Puritan forefathers. His generation should not be the one to “move the landmarks” which the fathers had set up.2 As for the departing shuttle, the sweeping forces of the Enlightenment irresistibly dragged Edwards and his congregation forward into a new age. It is my assumption that Edwards greatly desired to see where this strange new vessel would eventually lead the Western world.3 In this chapter, I argue that Jonathan Edwards endeavored to think, write, and live in both worlds. He lived on the very fault line of colossal change and yet there is no doubt that this straddling act brought about great stress, pressure, and difficulty. Pastorally, Edwards sought to vigorously defend the theological architecture around which his worldview was built, while compelled to do so against the swirling forces of exciting change that demanded new and innovative responses. While I argue that the strain of the times caused friction between Edwards and his congregation, Edwards and his contemporaries, and Edwards and his philosophical correspondents, I suspect the strain even caused friction within the man himself. For this reason, I will show how Jonathan Edwards tried to hold these two worlds together, even if unsuccessfully, especially as a local church minister. I will do three things in the pages that follow. First, I will examine Jonathan Edwards as a private thinker and Enlightenment enthusiast. Here, I will demonstrate ways in which Edwards gladly embraced the dawning new age, especially as he interacted with its ideas, innovations, and dilemmas. In this section, I will show Edwards himself as a child of the Enlightenment. But second, I will also consider Edwards’s rebuttal of those same Enlightenment principles, as a staunch public defender of Calvinistic orthodoxy. In the summary and conclusion, I will briefly consider whether these tensions may have contributed to his eventual termi“You are pleased dear sir, very kindly to ask me whether I could sign the Westminster Confession of Faith, & submit to the Presbyterian Form of Church Government; and to offer to use your Influence to procure a Call for me to some Congregation in Scotland. I should be very ungrateful, if I were not thankful for such Kindness & Friendship.—As to my subscribing to the substance of the Westminster Confession, there would be no difficulty : and as to the Presbyterian Governmt, I have long been perfectly out of conceit of our unsettled, independent, Confused way of Ch[urch] Government in this Land: And the Presbyterian way has ever appear’d to me most agreable to the word of God, and the Reason & nature of Things.” WJEO 32. 2 Cf. Proverbs 22:28. 3 In terms of his eschatology, Jonathan Edwards was a postmillennialist. Edwards believed that the condition of the world would advance and improve, thus ushering in a golden era of faithfulness and fidelity as the Kingdom “comes” (Matthew 6:10) in its fullness and power. Attendant to this, civilization would improve along with advances in the arts, sciences, politics, and the general welfare of the human condition. Edwards believed that the revivals he experienced in his own lifetime could be harbingers of this great new day dawning.

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nation as pastor of the Northampton Church, while ironically foisting him into greatness as a thinker and intellect. My essay will contribute to the overall structure of this book by providing the reader with a critical, if brief, biographical overview of Jonathan Edwards as an historical person of significance, as well as by presenting Edwards as a man uniquely positioned at the crux of two dynamic eras.

17.2 The Enlightenment and Its Possibilities Neophytes in the field of Jonathan Edwards studies are often surprised to learn that Edwards is classified among the Enlightenment thinkers. Here is the noted preacher of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), the infamously torturous and quintessentially Puritan sermon which defined the American Colonial period. This sermon stands as perhaps the most well-known piece of ecclesiastical literature in Colonial America’s rich history. With its manifold references to judgment, death, and hell, caricatures of Edwards’s preaching may suggest he harkens backwards to a more repressive Continental Puritanism of the 1600’s, instead of forwards to the New World progress of optimistic Americanism. It might seem by this sample alone that Edwards better represents the harsher and more repressive form of Calvinism, so ubiquitous in early Colonial America, which he inherited from his grandfather Solomon Stoddard (1643– 1729). Edwards was born only a decade after the notorious Salem Witch Trials (1692–1693), in which Cotton Mather himself holds such an inglorious place in history. Curiously, a direct line can even be drawn straight from Mather to Edwards.4 Yet even a superficial familiarity with Edwards’s biographical sketch gives us a more three-dimensional view of a thinking human being in process, much like the era in which he lived. Richly complex and textured as both thinker and experimental writer,5 Edwards was enamored with the possibilities of unbridled progress that typified the Enlightenment period. 4 For one thing, Jonathan Edwards’s father attended Cotton Mather’s church while he was a student at Harvard. It is possible that Jonathan could have met Cotton Mather as a youth. For another thing, Solomon Stoddard (Edwards’s maternal grandfather) had married the widow of Eleazar Mather, the brother of Increase Mather, who was ironically the previous pastor of the Northampton Church which Stoddard and Edwards eventually pastored! The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, edited by Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 366, 553. 5 Although his theology actually remained remarkably consistent over the decades, perhaps far more so than such theologians as Martin Luther and St. Augustine whose theology exhibits clear development, Edwards does evidence a willingness to “experiment” in his private writings, especially in his Miscellanies. Here, Edwards scholars perennially engage in an in-house debate about whether the “real Edwards” is best represented by his private musings, or his

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Richard A.S. Hall defines the Enlightenment as “a complex movement involving philosophy, science, and religion, which occurred in several countries and spanned the period roughly from 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) to 1800 (the French Empire under Napoleon).”6 Characteristic of this age, we might add to this definition, in agreement with Hall, that the Enlightenment emphasized several loose, galvanizing ideas and principles including: the rejection of authoritative dictates on religion and philosophy from centralized institutions, the preference instead towards one’s own experiences and reason, and the possibility of and contribution towards human progress. Although these hallmarks may not be immediately apparent in his writings, I contend that Edwards went through a discernable process of Enlightenment ratiocination in his process.7 We see signs emerging of an enlightened empiricist, for instance, already in Edwards’s teen years. His piece Of Insects (1720),8 developed quite early in his writing career, is a quintessential sample of observational science in process. Quaint yet insightful, the young Edwards detailed the habits of the movement,

much more refined works prepared for publication. By most accounts, Edwards is more daring and adventurous in his private Miscellanies, and considerably more cautious in his well-crafted publications intended for a broad audience. 6 Richard A.S. Hall, “Enlightenment” in The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, edited by Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). This definition is important because it broadly places the Enlightenment period between certain datable bookends, while resisting tidy categorization and unnecessary truncation. In reality, the Enlightenment was a massive shift of thinking that effected almost every field of human knowledge and inquiry in some way. 7 Toby K. Easley writes, “As Jonathan Edwards pondered understanding and sensing God, he undoubtedly contemplated the present limitations of human knowledge and the senses, in comparison to a future expanding knowledge and sense of an infinite God. The word ‘ratiocination’ is associated with the Latin term ratiocinari, and philosophers such as John Locke used it to refer to human reason. Edwards more than likely interacted with the term in his mind when reading Locke and others. Nevertheless, Edwards, using his own theological and philosophical prism, expanded on the word in order to contemplate the eternal implications of knowing God now and in eternity. Ratiocination can also be defined as the process of ‘exact thinking,’ ‘a reasoned train of thought,’ or ‘the process of logical reasoning.’ “Jonathan Edwards and Ratiocination: An Eternal Journey into the Discovery of God and Truth” in A Collection of Essays on Jonathan Edwards, edited by Robert L. Boss and Matthew V. Everhard (Fort Worth: JESociety Press, 2016), 68. 8 See WJE 6:163–69. There is some matter of misconception about the dating of this work as Sereno Dwight, Edwards’s early biographer incorrectly stated that Edwards wrote it when he was 12. This would put the date at 1716. He was however sixteen, a matter which Marsden corrects in his biography. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 66. For more on this topic, see Richard A.S. Hall “Jonathan Edwards on the ‘Flying Spider’: A Model of Ecological Thought in Microcosm.” Jonathan Edwards Studies 5, no. 1 (2015): 3–19, as well as Henry C. McCook, “Jonathan Edwards as a Naturalist.” Presbyterian and Reformed Review 1 (1890): 393–402.

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web design, and migration patterns of North American, woodland spiders.9 Although his adolescent mind was enraptured by the subjective process of empirical science through first-person observation, his career as a scientific writer was short lived: the piece was rejected for publication. Edwards’s infatuation with nature did not die, however, with the publication rejection letter of his spiders’ paper. He continued to write on the natural world for the rest of his career. Instead Edwards continued his deep introspective observations on the natural world well into adulthood in his ongoing collection of Images of Divine Things (1728 – mid 1750’s),10 a personal journal in which Edwards used the created order as a lens which to perceive the divine truths he thought to be encoded in the matrix of creation.11 In a fashion similar to Henry David Thoreau’s12 masterpiece Walden (1854), a transcendentalist view of nature and the environment, Edwards delighted to see the world laid before mortal eyes, searching for deeper truths and spiritual realities not immediately obvious to most. The difference, of course, between him and Thoreau, was that Edwards saw images and types of the Christ and His Kingdom everywhere he looked. Thoreau did not. In the silkworm,13 the raven,14 and the celestial bodies in their rotation,15 Edwards could see spiritual realities sprawled out before his naked eye; vestiges and portals into the eternal realities of Heaven and Hell; life, death, and the resurrection to come.

9 On some matters, the young Jonathan Edwards was simply wrong in his observations and conjectures about arachnids. Spiders do not waft out to sea on web-parachutes, as he suggested. Science sometimes moves at a slow pace and must be corrected again and again by subsequent analyses. 10 See WJE 11:51–142. This journal of 212 entries was begun in 1728, but continued through his Stockbridge period in the 1750’s. Originally entitled “Shadows of Divine Things” was changed by Edwards to “Images of Divine Things” beginning with entry 118. The “Images” notebook is now part of the definitive Yale Works of Edwards as Volume 11. 11 Unlike the deists and mechanists who saw the universe as primarily impersonal or subpersonal, with God less involved in the common affairs of daily life (or non-existent entirely in the case atheism), Edwards saw the universe as primarily personal, a flowing exchange of God’s love for His creatures. Says Marsden, “Edwards started with a personal and sovereign God who expressed himself even in the ever-changing relationship of every atom to each other.” A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 22. 12 Henry David Thoreau (1870–1862) was a complex American thinker, dabbling in both prose and poetry, philosophy and history. His writings are voluminous and are often political in nature. Throughout much of his life, he defended the freedom of humanity as an abolitionist. In 1845, he built himself a hut in the woods near Walden Pond through which he thought deeply on nature, individuality, and the meaning of life. Walden is among his most read and beloved works. 13 See Images #35, #142, and #198. Respectively, WJE 11:59, 142, 124. 14 See Images #61, WJE 11:70. 15 See Images #50, #53, #54, #146, #154. Respectively, WJE 11:64, 65, 66, 101, 104.

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In his graduate years, Edwards voraciously consumed Isaac Newton’s work on Opticks (1704),16 and was relentlessly fascinated with light itself, especially in regard to its refraction, color variations, and perceptions in the human eye.17 He contemplated and wrote draft papers on the sun’s light, rainbows, light emitted from far away stars, and was captivated by the ways in which light changes, as for instance when mitigated through a leaf. He pondered the jagged paths of lightning bolts through the sky. He wondered on paper why they seemed to immediately retrace their own paths and then disappear. His thoughts on light itself, as well as its refracted wavelengths and colors, would eventually contribute to his philosophical concept of “idealism,”18 in which Edwards came to believe that reality is primarily as it is perceived in the mind of the observer; especially as it relates to God’s own mind which subsumes all that ever was, and is, and is to come.19 Here we can see how his natural philosophy began to morph into his metaphysical philosophy. Espousing various forms of idealism would be a rather daring venture for a Calvinist theologian of any age. It was the Enlightenment that freed him to think precisely and in these daring categories. As Marsden succinctly puts it, “Edwards came of age at a time and place that would give him an acute juxtaposition of old and new outlooks in this revolution taking place.”20 As an interlocutor in current ideas, Edwards voraciously consumed both timely periodicals of newsworthy global events,21 as well as the latest ideas in Enlightenment philosophy. His interaction and early dependence on John Locke (1632–1704), among other writers, is well-known.22 Edwards reports that he eagerly read and digested John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding

16 Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was without hesitation one of the Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers. His work in both physics and mathematics is without any doubt groundbreaking. We know for sure that Edwards read Newton’s Opticks in particular, as several of his earlier notebooks remark about this work specifically. It was here in this work that Edwards would become consumed with the concepts of light and color. Perhaps this is why Edwards’s sermons exude with “light” as an illustration and an analogy for many concepts such as revelation, glory, illumination, inspiration, and regeneration. For more on Newton, see Richard Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1993. 17 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 67. 18 See Paul Helm, “Idealism” in New Dictionary of Theology, edited by Sinclair B. Ferguson and J.I. Packer (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 1998), 326–327. 19 For an excellent treatment on Jonathan Edwards and the philosophical concepts of idealism and occasionalism, see Oliver Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (Oxford University Press, 2012), 32–36, 95–97 and 158–163. See also by the same author, Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 169–179. 20 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 7. 21 He was, according to Marsden, an avid reader of The Spectator, a periodical which contained in its page the latest thoughts, discussions, and current events, see Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 62. 22 WJE 3:77–81.

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(1689) as a young man, and no doubt returned to it many times for reference.23 For Edwards, Locke opened the Pandora’s Box of conceptual and reasonable freethinking. So too did Edwards read and depend heavily on the aforementioned Isaac Newton (1643–1727), informing his view of the very structure of the material universe. Edwards read Newton with a scholastic eye, opened by awe and wonder, restrained only by bare and necessary logic. These two writers in particular, Locke and Newton, constitute the dual poles around which the elliptical orbit of the Enlightenment revolved. Newton and Locke whisper softly but audibly behind many of Edwards’s conceptual thought projects in his personal notebooks, The Miscellanies.24 Edwards’ interaction with post-Reformational thinkers did not end there. He read and interacted with Deists such as Anthony Collins (1626–1729), Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), and John Toland (1670–1722).25 As for the historians of the age, Edwards owned and read works by Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), David Hume (1711–1776), and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694).26 As for the Enlightenment moralists, he consumed and digested works by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Anthony Ashley Cooper the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), and again, David Hume.27 Many of these conversations took place only in Edwards’s private journals and Miscellanies. Some made it to publication in his major works. Nevertheless, he did interact with these writers intellectually, even while real-time correspondence was often impossible in his day and age, due especially to his relative position on the frontier of Colonial society.

23 In fact, he read these works like “the most greedy miser in gathering handfuls of silver and gold from some new discovered treasure.” Marsden, A Short Life, 19. 24 On John Locke, see Miscellanies aa, ee, 4, 71, 123, (WJE Volume 13); Miscellanies 645, (WJE Volume 18); Miscellanies 874, 986, 1011, 1029, 1060, (WJE Volume 20); Miscellanies 1153, 1210, 1217, (WJE Volume 23). On Isaac Newton, see Miscellanies 931, 976, 983, 984, (WJE Volume 20). 25 See Avihu Zakai, “The Age of Enlightenment” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, edited by Stephen J. Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80–95. Edwards took issue with these writers, as each of them posed various forms of Deism to which Edwards strenuously objected. Principally, Edwards thought Deism to be an errant and deviant form of theism in its having raised human reason and rationalism to an exalted height, which, he believed, compromised the Bible’s revelatory authority. Edwards believed that Deism was in fact eroding the solid base of Biblical Christianity in the Colonies and devoted most of his life project to confronting it. 26 Ibid., 90. As Zakai makes clear, Edwards objected to these writers as they seemed to diminish God’s controlling influence over the history of world affairs and His personal interactivity in events of redemption history. Edwards viewed history as unfolding exactly as conceived in the omniscient mind of God, not rather as driven along by the progressively strengthening winds of human progress and innovation. Edwards’s own The History of the Work of Redemption (1739) was his formal response. 27 Ibid., 92.

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As a theologian, Edwards rejected the necessity of depending upon accepted institutional authorities to discern truth, preferring rather to reason constructively from the ground up in his major works. In the early Reformation, one evidenced his learning by citing as many sources as possible from memory but in the Enlightenment age, the true free thinker eschews bald citations of authority for its own sake. For instance, in Freedom of the Will (1754), Edwards begins with a tacit acknowledgement that his view agrees in large part with that of John Calvin.28 But Edwards refused to depend upon Calvin, or any other human writers, for that matter. Perhaps he knew many Enlightenment readers would be suspect of such outmoded ad vericundium informal fallacies. Edwards’s ground-breaking view on the nature of the will, changed the very trajectory of Reformed thinking on the subject afterwards, and would stand as its own new and daring articulation of the age-old dilemma between divine sovereignty and human agency.29 Edwards writes to demonstrate that he is his own man: informed by Calvin and Locke on the nature of the will, but independent from them in terms of both methods and conclusions. In Freedom of the Will (1754) and Original Sin (1758), for instance, Edwards is far more likely to cite a contemporary source (usually an opponent) than to cite an amicus voice from the past as authoritative.30 Very infrequently in any of his major treatises does Edwards refer to the writings of such theologians as Augustine, Luther, or Calvin as authoritative proof texts. His sermons too, can be read at length with almost no references to these men as garnered support. His power as a writer will be in the irresistible force of his reason, not in his ability to quote and cite accepted institutional authorities for their own sake.

28 Referring to the terms ‘Arminianism’ and ‘Calvinism,’ he says in context in the Author’s Preface to the Freedom of the Will, “If when I had occasion to speak of those divines who are commonly called by this name, I had, instead of styling them Arminians, called them “these men,” as Dr. Whitby does Calvinistic divines; it probably would not have been taken any better, or thought to show a better temper, or more good manners. I have done as I would be done by, in this matter. However the term “Calvinist” is in these days, among most, a term of greater reproach than the term “Arminian”; yet I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s sake: though I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing in everything just as he taught.” (WJE 1:131). 29 See Philip John Fisk, Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). 30 By way of example, in Original Sin, Edwards discusses the writings of contemporaries John Taylor (1694–1761), George Turnbull (1698–1748), Francis Hutchenson (1694–1746), and Henry Winder (1693–1752). Of these writers, Taylor is singled out for polemical engagement throughout the work. At times, entire sections of Taylor’s work The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1740) are quoted or paraphrased and then refuted. But as for St. Augustine, Martin Luther, or John Calvin—divines that one might think relevant for defending the essentially Augustinian/Calvinistic position of original sin—nary can a reference be found.

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Curiously, Edwards depended upon and trusted in scientifically informed medicine, both for himself and his family. Although his understanding of drugrelated technology reflects a Pre-Industrial Revolution perspective,31 he eagerly sought advances in this field for himself and others. Both ironically and tragically, Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation gone awry. Still in its experimental stages, Edwards trusted in humanity’s burgeoning knowledge in the field of medicine; even to the point of voluntarily subjecting himself to experimental novelties, ultimately succumbing to his own mortality through these means. Edwards trusted in the new techniques just then available to humankind through empirical science, and unfortunately the dark side of emerging human technology killed him. His death was both unnecessary and necessary in some ways: Unnecessary for Edwards, as he had no acute need to take the inoculation. He did not have smallpox and needed no urgent intervention. In this way, he died as a “martyr” to the cause of human pharmacological advance. But beyond his interest in scientific discovery and appeals to rational thought, Edwards also partook in slavery, an industry shaped by the Enlightenment. Although he was a forward thinker in many capacities, he was also a slave holder. Although some of his theological descendants such as Jonathan Edwards Jr. (1745–1801) and Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803) could later see the inherent contradiction between holding slaves and the biblical doctrine of the imago dei, Edwards could not (or would not) see it himself. For all of his brilliance and insight into Newton’s Opticks and the sun’s glorious light, he could not see the fuller, brighter light of human equality. Burns, Minkema, and Neele, impress a searing brand on Edwards’s legacy as an Enlightenment thinker by stating that, “[What] we now know of the brutalizing dehumanization of the slave market did not faze him . . . Apparently, Edwards was so at home with the institution of slavery, and the status that it conferred on aristocratic clergymen such as himself, that he never really questioned its central tenets (emphasis added).”32 Perhaps we

31 Consider here his advice to his daughter Esther Burr Edwards, “As to means for your health, we have procured one rattlesnake, which is all we could get. It is a medicine that has been very serviceable to you heretofore, and I would have you try it still. If your stomach is very weak and will bear but little, you must take it in smaller quantities. We have sent you some ginseng. I should think it best for you to make trial of that various ways: try stewing it in water, and take it in strength and quantity as you find suits your stomach best. You may also try steeping it in wine, in good Madeira or claret; or if these wines are too harsh, then in some good white wine. And whether you stew or steep it, you had best to slice it very thin, or bruise it in an iron mortar. And for a cordial take some spices steeped in some generous wine that suits your taste, and stomach. And above all the rest, use riding in pleasant weather; and when you can bear it, riding on horseback; but never so as to fatigue you. And be very careful to avoid taking cold.” (WJE 16:577). 32 Burns, “Trusting the Theology of a Slave Holder,” 149.

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can sadly conclude that Edwards wasn’t as forward thinking in his social justice as he was with his philosophy and infatuation with empirical observation.

17.3 Terra Firma, the Ground in which Edwards Dug His Heel Everyone has aspects of his or her thinking, personalities, and motives that are not in full internal alignment or agreement. None of us, even the most fully sane and rational, are in complete coherence with ourselves. The interesting tension that I am here laboring to display is that while Edwards employed a methodology that one would have expected to lead in a far more progressive social and philosophical direction, instead Edwards ultimately defended the high-orthodox Calvinism that he inherited from his Puritan ancestors. Edwards was not reticent to experiment with fringe views, especially in his personal writings and musings, which would lend themselves towards idealism,33 occasionalism,34 and even (according to some) panentheism.35 These are certainly not the stock trade concepts of Puritanism. Yet there remains this inherent tension and living contradiction in Edwards: despite his predilection towards Lockean rationalism and a post-Newtonian metaphysical natural philosophy, Edwards remained an ardent defender of the previous age’s doctrinal orthodoxy. In other words, his overall conclusions were precisely the opposite of what one might expect to find in a quintessentially Enlightenment-oriented thinker. Consider for instance that the net result of the broader Enlightenment’s influence in the New World brought about the rise of three simultaneous, and over lapping constructs: in terms of theology proper, Deism36, in terms of evangelical Christianity in particular, Arminianism,37 and in terms of metaphysics, a mechanistic universe. Each of these three paradigms rose, in part, because the 33 See Oliver Crisp’s chapter entitled “Ontology” in his very helpful work Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation, 14–36. See also his chapter “On the Orthodoxy of Jonathan Edwards” in Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians, 164–182. 34 Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation, 14–36. 35 See Crisp on “Panentheism” in Ibid., 138–163. See also his section on Panentheism in Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians, 179–181. 36 Wallace E. Anderson writes, “While Latitudinarians like Locke saw revelation as confirming the ‘reasonableness of Christianity’ so long as faith and reason were kept within their proper ‘boundaries,’ the Deists did not. In his seminal work, De Veritate (1624), Lord Edmund Herbert de Cherbury had separated ‘Revealed truth’ from self-evident truth, thereby relegating revelation to a subsidiary, and therefore doubtful, status. Those influenced by Herbert sought to rest their definition of true religion on the epistemological foundations of human reason and the laws of nature. Whatever was beyond the ken of these was ultimately of no force.” WJE 11:12–13. 37 See C.C. Goen’s section entitled “The Arminian Threat” in the introduction to The Great Awakening, WJE 4:4–18.

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Enlightenment led the intellectual world away from the unchallengeable dogmas of the previous era. Fading quickly were centralized ecclesiastical traditions and authorities. Doctrines such as predestination and original sin were being openly questioned if not directly attacked. Morality was reorienting around natural law, inherent in man’s own growing self-awareness, rather than divine, revealed law mandated from a sovereign Lord. Yet when we read Edwards’s major works, we can see without difficulty that Edwards passionately resisted all three of the above-named paradigms despite their meteoric rise in his lifetime. Rather than being open to a more anthropocentric conception of meaning, nature, and ethics, instead Edwards fought hard against the current drive towards accentuated humanism, and instead devoted his intellectual prowess and labors to a recovery of and defense of traditional Calvinism, as understood by the Puritans in particular, and the broader heirs of the Reformation movement in general.38 Because of the vastness of Edwards’s corpus, we must necessarily limit our scope in some way. In order to do so, I shall focus on the three major treatises that Edwards wrote during the time of his service as missionary to the Mahican Indians in the Stockbridge settlement, namely The End for Which God Created the World (1755), The Nature of True Virtue (1755), and Original Sin (1758). These three pieces, all written within a few years of one another, are each critical to understanding the worldview of Edwards because each piece in different ways chops away at the prevailing anthropomorphism which Edwards perceived to be gaining ground not only in Europe, but also in the British-American colonies. They also have in common the fact that Edwards had a freer schedule in Stockbridge to tackle some projects that he had been thoughtfully preparing in his notebooks for some time. Thus, the represent his mature thinking on the subject matter. The first of these, The End for Which God Created the World, was a direct assault on the growing notion that humanity—rather than God—was the existential center of meaning. If the Enlightenment sought to supplant the centrality of the absolute supremacy of God in the universe, replacing the divine YHWH with humankind’s uniqueness as rational, thinking beings, Edwards sought to restore and correct this error as forcefully as possible. The End begins with a rather extended treatment on the difference between logical “ends”; subordinate ends are penultimate, ultimate ends are supreme.39 God created the world, Edwards argues, primarily to demonstrate not humankind’s uniqueness 38 Marsden says, “His experience of intensely held Calvinism in the era of the cool reason of the Enlightenment resulted in remarkable creativity.” A Short Life, 4. 39 For this complex section on the difference between subordinate ends, ultimate ends, and chief ends, see WJE 8:405–414. Here, Edwards evidences a tightly logical method that will surely engage his Enlightenment keyed readers who will be looking carefully for a diligently reasoned treatise.

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and value, but rather to display God’s own infinite worth. According to Edwards, this is in no way inconsistent or selfish on God’s part, because the perfections of God’s valuations will not allow Him to reckon otherwise. His omniscient justice precludes that possibility.40 God’s highest “end” in creating anything is always His own glory above all; but subordinately that God’s own glory would be simultaneously perceived and rejoiced in by rational creatures. Edwards argued in agreement with most Enlightenment thinking that it was true that God ordained that humankind realize happiness, but this happiness cannot be derived from one’s own self-actualization. Rather, in God’s emanating His glory and man’s reflecting it back to Him in joyful worship and praise, God’s great end in creating a world filled with rational creatures who can comprehend God’s incomparable worth is achieved. Simultaneously, the penultimate end of man’s own happiness likewise obtains.41 The treatise ends with a forceful exposition of biblical texts42 which clearly establish God’s dominion, supremacy, and ultimate significance in a universe against which man is increasingly selfasserting his own position. God, he argues, will share His glory with no creature. In short, Edwards will not tolerate an anthropocentric conception of the universe which he believed the newer Enlightenment worldview was foisting upon thinking people. In the next work, written as a companion to the aforementioned volume, Edwards hoped to discuss more fully what it meant for man to live morally and ethically. In the Nature of True Virtue, Edwards demonstrates his diversity and creativity as a writer. While The End was theological and even biblically exegetical, The Nature of True Virtue purposely leaves behind any vestige of biblical terminology and argues far more like a secular philosopher.43 Readers are struck 40 He says, “Here by the way it may be properly considered, whether some writers are not chargeable with inconsistence in this respect, viz. that whereas they speak against the doctrine of God’s making himself his own highest and last end, as though this were an ignoble selfishness in God: when indeed he only is fit to be made the highest end, by himself and all other beings; inasmuch as he is the highest Being, and infinitely greater and more worthy than all others— yet with regard to creatures, who are infinitely less worthy of supreme and ultimate regard, they (in effect at least) suppose that they necessarily at all times seek their own happiness, and make it their ultimate end in all, even their most virtuous actions: and that this principle, regulated by wisdom and prudence, as leading to that which is their true and highest happiness, is the foundation of all virtue and everything that is morally good and excellent in them.” WJEO 8:452–453. 41 “God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures: because9 the emanation of his glory (which he seeks and delights in, as he delights in himself and his own eternal glory) implies the communicated excellency and happiness of his creature.” WJEO 8: 459. 42 This massive section contains nearly seventy pages of Edwards proof-texting his thesis that God’s glory is His own highest end. WJEO 8: 467–536. 43 There are no biblical quotations in The Nature of True Virtue. Edwards omitted this source of discussion to establish himself as a credible philosopher who could argue with the force of reason alone.

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by the lack of overt theological language in this short work. Neither do biblical quotations multiply as in The End. Its terms are the tools of a philosopher of ethics discussing morality on its own ground. But the main thrust of the book strikes similar chords to The End. The Nature of True Virtue argues that true morality can be summed up by what Edwards calls “Benevolence to being in general.”44 But since God contains the greatest amount of being (if being can indeed be quantified conceptually), more so than any limited creature confined to time and space, God alone must be loved most greatly of all.45 Before any man can act morally or exhibit benevolence to self, others, or creation, he first of all must show love to the Creator. Here is the beginning point of any enlightened discussion of ethics. It is ridiculous, then, to hold that there can even be an ethical system in which God is not central.46 Enlightenment talk about humanity living in harmony with self, others, and nature is meaningless unless God is realized as the fundamental principle and logical beginning point of all moral engagement. In Original Sin, Edwards turns his pen towards the genre of confrontational polemics. In particular, he counter-attacks the growing antagonism he perceived from writers such as John Taylor who baldly contradicted received Christian dogmas, such as the one in focus in this treatise, the sinful depravity of human nature. This completes a literary triad of sorts, with The End arguing primarily on both logical and biblically exegetical grounds, The Nature of True Virtue inviting discussion in the philosopher’s agora, and Original Sin in the arena of confrontational polemics. In this work, Edwards labors hard to defend the traditional view of original sin, that is, that humankind is tainted by the deadly plague of a rebellious disease which makes him liable to sin, death, and judgment while 44 WJEO 8:540. 45 Edwards writes, “Therefore he that has true virtue, consisting in benevolence to Being in general, and in that complacence in virtue, or moral beauty, and benevolence to virtuous being, must necessarily have a supreme love to God, both of benevolence and complacence. And all true virtue must radically and essentially, and as it were summarily, consist in this. Because God is not only infinitely greater and more excellent than all other being, but he is the head of the universal system of existence; the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom, and through whom, and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.” WJEO 8:551. 46 He says, “There seems to be an inconsistence in some writers on morality, in this respect, that they don’t wholly exclude a regard to the Deity out of their schemes of morality, but yet mention it so slightly, that they leave me room and reason to suspect they esteem it a less important and a subordinate part of true morality; and insist on benevolence to the created system in such a manner as would naturally lead one to suppose they look upon that as by far the most important and essential thing in their scheme. But why should this be? If true virtue consists partly in a respect to God, then doubtless it consists chiefly in it.” WJEO 8:552–553.

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placing him hopelessly at enmity with God. Here, Edwards stands alongside Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in asserting that man’s fundamental problem is spiritual.47 Like Adam, all of humanity share in the consequences of our foreparents’ rebellious action in the Garden of Eden.48 Yet this ancient doctrine was quickly losing ground in the new age. As Holbrook notes, “The notion of man as a fundamentally rational, benevolently inclined individual was emerging as the unquestionable postulate for the expansionist mood of Western Culture. But the doctrine of original sin marred this flattering image. It stood for everything the spirit of the Enlightenment detested.”49 This brought Taylor and Edwards into literary and intellectual conflict. Edwards argues for the traditional view of sin, directly rebuking Taylor’s book The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1738). But as he does so, Edwards uses creative arguments never before utilized in the long history of this discussion. Edwards realized that as Enlightenment thinking spread across the BritishAmerican colonies, as it had already done in Europe, it was more essential than ever before to argue for the ancient position on sin, but with an increasingly modern and rational approach. Merely reciting well-worn jargon and rehearsing tired Augustinian arguments would not effectively put down Taylor’s objections and rhetorical questions. Taylor had brazenly questioned the received tradition by asking: How can humankind be related to Adam through original sin? How can we, today, be held guilty for his rebellion so long ago? How can Adam’s actions cause us to carry in our bodies and spirits the taint of a damaged human nature? Doesn’t this old doctrine argue against (and even destroy) the newer Enlightenment ideal of a thinking man in control of his own person and destiny? As the number and seriousness of these questions mounted, Taylor seemed all too happy to try to dethrone the ancient Augustinian position on human depravity and topple it over once and for all. To respond to these challenges, Edwards took an innovative approach. In Edwards’ mind, God can view all human beings as descendants of Adam, he avers, because God holds all persons to be of one and the same living stock with Adam. Just as a tree (Edwards’s metaphor50) is the same living creature as the 47 Quoting Holbrook, “Edwards’ defense of the doctrine of original sin rests upon three major interlocking contentions: first, that all men, in a wide diversity of circumstances, unfailingly and persistently do fall into heinous sin, which is justly punishable by God; second, that the only rational explanation for this deplorable state of affairs is humankind’s vitiated and corrupt nature, brought about by the fall of Adam, in which all men participated by virtue of the principle of identity; and third, that God, although completely sovereign, cannot in the least be regarded as the active author of sin or as unjust in his arrangement of a world in which this continuing debacle takes place.” (WJE 3:26). 48 See Genesis 3:1–24; Romans 1:18–32; 3:1–20; 5:12–21. 49 WJE 3:1. 50 WJE 3:385–386; 389–391.

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acorn from whence it came, human progeny share an existential oneness with Adam which keeps us intertwined as branches growing upward from one guilty root. Though a tree may change size, shape and form over many decades—and perhaps even experience every biological cell being replaced over time—yet it is the same living organism. God alone has the ability to see this continuity of life. Locke had argued something similar about individual consciousness.51 Even still, Edwards argues using a novel view of reality often termed “continuous creation”52 in which he holds that God recreates the whole of the universe in every successive moment, and yet still views it to be the same existential reality. If God can do that with the universe, surely he can reckon the essential continuity of the human race. Thus, our status as independent moral contractors is apparent only to us; while God views the whole race as equally to blame for Adam’s rebellion. To be clear, continual creation is not a traditional argument in Reformed theology.53 Yet in employing it, Edwards is able to dismiss Taylor’s apparent problem of humankind passing guilt onward, downward through human progeny, since God perceives the whole of humanity to be ethically and morally responsible as a sameself unit. This is so, Edwards reminds his readers, since God ordained Adam to be the covenant and federal head of the human race en toto, acting on the behalf of one and all. Throughout the treatise, Edwards redresses as many exegetical passages as space allows, paying particular attention to Taylor’s perceived misreading of Romans, which Edwards believes to be egregious. At the end of the treatise, Edwards has achieved something remarkable; he has again defended the received tradition but done so in a novel and provocative way. Once again, he exhibits his unique perspectival stance astride the two divergent epochs: he defends the old orthodoxy as a Calvinist, but does so in unique, daring ways with freethinking Enlightenment-inspired audacity.

51 WJE 3:55. 52 WJE 3:57. See also Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation, 25–26. See also Crisp, Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians, 12–13. 53 For a basic description of Edwards’s concept of continuous creation, see Crisp, Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians, 69–79. This particular writer is not aware of any other Reformed theologian who defends this highly nuanced this view of creation. In some ways, it is strikingly contrasted with that of the Magisterial Reformers (i. e. Calvin, Bucer), the British and Reformed Confessions (i. e. Westminster Confession of Faith; Belgic Confession), and the Princeton Reformed Theologians (i. e. A. A. Hodge, Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield). A comparison of each of these perspectives within the Reformed tradition is beyond the scope of this chapter, but I do believe it is fair to simply say Edwards’s view would stand out as markedly unique among them.

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17.4 Jonathan Edwards—An Intellect Precariously Astride Two Diverging Epochs There are no doubt costs to be paid for the one who purposefully tries to live, think, act, and stand in two worlds at once. In some regards, it is often better to choose one’s camp, and then dwell fully therein, accepting the consequences as they may come. At least in this regard, by picking sides, those of great conviction and consequence are usually well eulogized by their own intellectual heirs even if they are ultimately made martyrs by their critics. Edwards chose another way forward during his own lifetime. This is not to say that Edwards hasn’t been eulogized greatly since his rediscovery in the days of the late Perry Miller (1905– 1963), who brought Edwards studies back to the fore. Edwards certainly has enjoyed his eulogizers. But in his own day and age, choosing to stand astride two diverging intellectual epochs came with some cost in terms of his own personal peace and reputation. Space considerations will limit this discussion to just a brief survey of those costs which were born by Edwards. But we can be sure that they were stressful. We should begin this last thread by noting that Edwards’ genius was not immediately recognized by all in his day. For instance, Edwards tried to take a middle ground with regard to the revivals that often could not win the full approval of either its enthusiastic advocates like James Davenport (1716–1757) or its critics like Charles Chauncey (1705–1787).54 Edwards chose a diagnostic perspective on the revivals that preferred levelheaded, rational, analysis to bipolarity. The same skills of observation and analysis that the sixteen-year-old Edwards applied to woodland spiders, he later applied to the revivals of 1735 (local/regional) and the early 1740’s (regional/national) respectively. Edwards put the happenings of the revivals under his proverbial microscope and analyzed them as a unique species of events. He did this in a series of important writings, the most significant of which were The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival in New England (1742), and The Religious Affections (1746). Like the spiders hanging from his stick, he personally held the events, occurrences, and habits of the subjects of revival up for patient

54 See the section entitled ‘Critics’ Onslaught’ in C.C. Goen’s introduction to WJE 4, The Great Awakening, 56–65. Here we sense the tension that Edwards must have felt in being attacked from both sides regarding the revivals. On one hand, enthusiasts like Davenport argued that Edwards and others were not going far enough. Some enthusiasts even accused fellow ministers of not being truly Spirit-filled. On the other hand, skeptics of the revival held that those who were greatly affected were either deceived or charlatans. Edwards, holding the middle ground that the revivals were legitimate, even if often excessive, was attacked from both polarities.

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and detailed examination.55 For this reason, Edwards maintained the unique purview of alternating back and forth within these works between being both the revivals’ enthusiastic advocate and objective critic.56 His rationalism would not allow him to advocate for the revivals in any unqualified, unthinking way. Nevertheless, his theological conservativism gave him the divine perspective to see nothing less than the sovereign God as the revivals’ ultimate source and cause. Of course, like most who forge middle ways, this cooler analytical objectivity caused him to be criticized, at times severely, by both Old and New Lights alike.57 There is probably no greater place that Edwards felt the personal stress of trying to walk in both worlds at once than in his own family relations. Edwards was often forced to strive against the more ‘progressive’ Williams clan, his close cousins and relatives, in a battle for social and political wherewithal.58 At times, these squabbles were born out of petty jealousy and the like. Colonel Israel Williams (1709–1788), for instance, nearly got away with removing militia protection from the Stockbridge mission during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), apparently out of shear spite. But at other times, the rivalry was far more cerebral, especially when it manifested upon intellectual and ecclesiastical issues. Solomon Williams (1700– 1776), for example, directly engaged Edwards in writing over the communion controversy, sparking a brief pamphlet war among relatives.59 On the same matter, 55 Most interestingly, in Some Thoughts, Edwards gives a detailed examination of his wife’s own spiritual encounters during the revival period, even if he cloaks her identity in anonymity. See WJE 4:334–341. 56 Edwards balances this “back and forth” motif in critiquing the revivals particularly well, for instance, in his section in Some Thoughts, Parts 3 and 4. In Part 3, Edwards labors to show how the promoters of the revival have been, in some cases, maligned. In Part 4, he shows how they have often gone too far, naming examples of behaviors that need to be corrected. Among his strongest critiques he names spiritual pride, being led by “impressions” instead of by Scripture, failure to observe order, judging others’ hearts, having mixed motives etc. See WJE 384–495. 57 See C.C. Goen’s section entitled “Critics Onslaught” in the introduction to Volume 4, The Great Awakening, of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. WJE 4:56–65. See also his section on “Counterthoughts,” WJE 4:79–83. 58 In a family relationship that owned several nuanced relational complexities, the Edwards family was often at odds with their cousins, the Williams family. These complexities often boiled over in the form of both passive aggressive and more overt forms of in-fighting. Common areas of disagreement centered upon social rank, privilege, prominence, and ecclesiology. More than once, these tension caused Edwards deep pain as his position as minister was challenged both directly and indirectly. There is no doubt that this family squabble contributed to Edwards’s dismissal from the Northampton Church as well as creating further complexities regarding the school in Stockbridge for the Native American peoples of the Mahican tribe. See Kenneth Minkema, The Edwardses: A Ministerial Family in Eighteenth-Century New England. Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1988. 59 Briefly, Edwards sought to reverse the policy of his grandfather Rev. Solomon Stoddard in the Northampton Church regarding one’s qualification to receive the Lord’s Supper. Stoddard saw it as a “converting ordinance,” and permitted those who had not yet given a verifiable testimony of saving grace to the elders, but who otherwise lived scandal-free and upright lives.

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Ephraim Williams (1715–1755) called Edwards “a great bigot” for his more conservative opinions related to church membership, an opinion shared by enough members of the church to oust the 23-year pulpit veteran.60 It might be argued that both his methods and his final convictions did, in a sense, actually cost him his job. Edwards was fired from the pulpit of the Northampton Church, not so much for his failure to carry on Solomon Stoddard’s methods of administrating Communion, but for his desire to bring the standards even further back in time to conformity with practices predating the Halfway Covenant.61 Edwards’s convictions on the sacraments were considered to be so retrograde to the growing class of socially gentile deists among Northampton, that his congregation eventually found them (and him) entirely intolerable. Edwards was perceived to have cunningly doubled back on the Halfway Covenant, forged by the previous generation of pastors (including his grandfather Stoddard), such that his position henceforth became unacceptable to the people in his own pews. It did not matter that Edwards could argue forcefully for his convictions in a series of tightly logical sermons and writings on the topic. His endless rational persuasion could do him no further good. Thus, Edwards would be pushed to the frontier by this series of events, ultimately removing him from his beloved congregation, and placing him in Stockbridge where the three mature treatises earlier discussed were written. Perhaps the greatest irony that can be observed is that by standing astride these two great tectonic plates of his own changing intellectual times, Edwards was able to write and think from a position that few in his day were able to emulate. Some will say that Edwards’s dark side was his dogged retention of Calvinism. Others will say that his Achilles heel was his veering from the Reformed tradition in terms of method. That of course will depend on one’s individual perspective. Jonathan Edwards both defended a Calvinism that was at least as conservative as that which his ancestors bequeathed to him; yet all the while doing so from an empirical and rational methodology that was in some ways wildly creative. It just may be that this, at least in part, accounts for his greatness as an eighteenth-century thinker.

Edwards sought a far more rigid qualification process by which members might receive the sacrament of the table. This, among other things, led directly to his dismissal as pastor. For more on the communion controversy that led to Edwards’s dismissal from the Northampton Church, see John F. Jamieson, “Jonathan Edwards’s Change of Position on Stoddardeanism.” Harvard Theological Review 74 (1981): 79–99, and Brooks H. Holifield, The Covenant Sealed The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology, 1570–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 206–20, 228–29. 60 Marsden, A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards, 119. 61 See WJE 4:12–13 for a brief description of the Halfway Covenant and its immediate ramifications.

Contributors

John T. Lowe is a Ph.D. Candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds a B.A. from the University of Louisville, and a M.Div. and Th.M. from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His research focuses on race and religion in early America. His current work focuses on early evangelicalism and the role it had on the development of slavery and race. Daniel N. Gullotta is a Ph.D. Candidate at Stanford University in American Religious History. His research is currently focused on the intersection of religion and politics in the Age of Jackson, particularly as it relates to the rise of the Jacksonian Democratic coalition. He received his M.A.R. in the History of Christianity at Yale University Divinity School. Emily Dolan Gierer has an M.A. and Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Connecticut and an M.Div from Yale University Divinity School. Her work on women and religion has been published in The Journal of Religion and Society, American Literary Realism, and Jonathan Edwards Studies, and her current research focuses on gender and rhetoric in colonial New England conversation narratives. John Howard Smith is Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Commerce, where he teaches early American history. He is the author of The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion: A History of Sandemanianism in the Eighteenth Century (SUNY Press, 2008) and The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725–1775 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015). Gideon Mailer is Associate Professor of History at University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is the author of John Witherspoon’s American Revolution (UNC Press and OIEAHC, 2017). He is currently researching and writing about the association between Anglo-Scottish unionism, religion, and constitutional pluralism in

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Contributors

eighteenth-century America, as well as the links between piety, moral philosophy, and American Slavery. Christopher Woznicki is a Ph.D. Candidate at Fuller Theological Seminary. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from UCLA and an M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. His research focuses on the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards, Reformation accounts of prayer, and contemporary systematic theology. Christopher’s research has appeared in several historical, philosophical, and theological journals. Sarah Boss is currently completing a M.A. in English literature and linguistics at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, Hungary. She holds a B.A. in English literature and history from Wheaton College. She is the associate editor for JESociety, and her research interests center on Jonathan Edwards’s typology and natural philosophy. Christian Cuthbert holds a B.S. degree from Nyack College, an M.A. in Theology and an MA in Church History from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He completed his Ph.D. at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Historical and Theological Studies under the direction of Mark Valeri. His dissertation examined the life of Edwards’s uncle, John Stoddard and his continuing research covers religion and public service in provincial New England with a focus on Jonathan Edwards and war. Matthew V. Everhard is the Senior Pastor of Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) in Brooksville, Florida. He holds a B.A. from Malone University, an M.A. from Ashland Theological Seminary, and a D.Min from Reformed Theological Seminary. Matthew’s dissertation was recently published as “A Theology of Joy: Jonathan Edwards and Eternal Happiness in the Holy Trinity.” He has authored several other essays, articles, and chapters on Jonathan Edwards. Kamil M. Halambiec is an ordained minister and Associate Dean and Director of English Program of Studies at the College of Theology and Social Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. He studied at different institutions including Universities such as Yale (S.T.M.), Bangor (M.Th), and the Cardinal Wyszyn´ski University in Warsaw (Ph.D. in Christian Philosophy). His research focuses on philosophy of religious experience, theology and history of revivals. Russ Allen is an Ed.D candidate at Liberty University. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Dickinson College and Liberty University, respectively. His M.A. thesis focused on Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of childhood and

Contributors

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youth. Russ is currently researching worldview perspectives in public high school classrooms. Mark G. Spencer is Professor of History at Brock University. Among his dozen authored or edited volumes are David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (2005), The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (2 vols, 2015), and Hume’s Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition (2017). Obbie Tyler Todd is pastor of the Church at Haynes Creek in Oxford, Georgia. He is a Ph.D. candidate at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and holds a Th.M. and M.Div. from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His research focuses on the nineteenth century Baptist Richard Furman. Lucas Hardy is Associate Professor of English at Youngstown State University. His recent essays on Anne Bradstreet and Cotton Mather have appeared in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. At present, he is completing a book that examines how the lived experience of pain shaped notions of social belonging in early American religious communities. Philip John Fisk (Ph.D.) is senior researcher and lecturer in historical theology at the Jonathan Edwards Center Benelux, headquartered at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit Leuven, Belgium. He is the award-winning author of Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will New Directions (2016).