The function of the aesthetic in the thought of Jonathan Edwards

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TEE FOTCTIOH OF THE AESTHETIC IE THE THOUGHT OF JOHATHAH ED** WARDS

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School The University of Southern California

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

by Howard Alexander Redmond June 1950

UMI Number: EP65202

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IETROBUCTIOE This paper is basically a response to a suggestion in H. G, Townsend’s hook, Philosophical Ideas in the United States,

In his chapter on Edwards, Townsend says

that

Edwards m a n ’s love to God is motivated by the divine

for

beauty,

t’We do not easily remember this because it is an abstruse met­ aphysical notion.

Yet there is reason to believe that it ex­

presses the real heart of Edwards’ ethico-religious phy.”^

philoso­

A statement like this cannot long remain unchallenged.

If it is false it must be exposed. explored and extensively documented.

If it is true it must

be

To critically examine

the evidence for Townsend’s thesis Is the task of this paper. If the results of this investigation are negative, the study will at least serve the function of correcting roneous statement.

an

er­

If the results are positive, however— if

the aesthetic is found to be at the heart of Edwards1 system— a genuine contribution to the increasing body of Edwardsian literature may be made.

Though most of the standard books on

Edwards acknowledge beauty to be an important element in

his

thought, none goes so far as Townsend to suggest that the aes­ thetic is basic to his system, and that Edwards was first of all an aesthetician.

And Townsend, though he suggests

the

thesis, does not attempt (because of the limitations of space) H. G. Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States (Eew York and Cincinnati, American Book Company, 1934), p. 55.

iii to document it.

Plainly, then, here is an area for research.

If "America's first philosopher"2

was essentially an

aes-

thetician, the fact should he made known, since it may

shed

important light on early American philosophy and theology# The primary source for the study of Edwards

in

this

paper is his Works in four volumes, 1855, heing a reprint the Worcester edition,

of

The ten-volume edition of Edwards,

though somewhat more complete, is not worked because of greater availability of the four-volume edition. ondary sources are also of great value.

the

Several sec­

Townsend,

already

mentioned, provides the stimulus-idea for the paper.

Faust

and Johnson, though neglecting the aesthetic side of Edwards, provide an excellent synoptic view of his thought.

McGiffert’s

volume presents a philosophico-historicai appraisal of man.

the

Winslow, though lacking somewhat in technical philosoph­

ical analysis, contains a large number of interesting and rel­ evant facts about Edwards’ life and surroundings, and is far the most readable of the studies.

by

Miller’s Images

and

Shadows of Divine Things is very interesting and important; but his general volume on Edwards is weighted too heavily

on

the side of the influence on Edwards of Loekian sensationalism and Newtonian physics,

A. V. G. Allen, the standard philosoph­

ical biography, is very complete, but is in this paper

some-

ft From an address by Dr. Donald H. Rhoades, March 7,

1950.

what neglected in favor of the many more modern studies. unpublished doctoral dissertation of Rhoades provides helpful insights into the philosophical and theological

The many as­

pects of Edwards1 thought* The plan of the paper is to examine the aesthetic ele­ ments in Edwards (Part I), and then to study the background, meaning and implications of his view of the aesthetic (Part II),

For a more complete preview of the paper’s plan

reader is referred to the fable of Contents,

the

TABLE OF CONTENTS PART Is

THE AESTHETIC ELEMENT IN EDWARDS

CHAPTER

PACE

I. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY TO THE EDWARDS IAN SYSTEM

1

II. THE IMPORTANCE OF PROPORTION TO THE EDWARDS IAN SYSTEM . . . . . . . . .......................... III. PROPORTION AS THE BASIS OF BEAUTY IV. VIRTUE AS BEAUTY

. . . . . . . .

...................

. ♦ ♦

V. THE INTUITIVE APPREHENSION OF BEAUTY . . . . . . .

23 50 59 69

PART II: ABOUT THE AESTHETIC OF EDWARDS VI* CLASSIFICATION

...........

75

VII. AESTHETIC INFLUENCES ON E D W A R D S .................

86

VIII. THE BEAUTY OF EDWARDS1 S T Y L E ............ EC. EDWARDS THE CONTRADICTION X. E V A L U A T I O N ......................................... XI. SUMMARY

.

..................................

B I B L I O G R A P H Y ......................................

90 97 101 108 Ill

PART I:

THE AESTHETIC ELEMEHT IH EDWARDS CHAPTER I

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY TO THE EDWARDS IAH SYSTEM The function of beauty in the thought of Jonathan Ed ­ wards is an important one*

Our purpose in this chapter is to

survey, in general terms, the many references to beauty in the total Edwardsian thought-structure, in order to establish fac­ tually the proposition that the aesthetic plays a prominent role in his system* Townsend’s statement that ” * . * there is reason to think that it

[Edwards’ idea of the divine beauty as the m o ­

tive for m a n ’s loving G o d

expresses the real heart of E d ­

w a r d s ’ ethico-religious philosophy” has already been given attention*

But do the other Edwardsian scholars share this

general view?

The answer is in the affirmative, though some

scholars would probably qualify Townsend’s statement.

The

time-honored Edwards biographer, A. V. G. Allen, stresses the importance of beauty to the divine nature:

’’Only let God be

supremely happy, let Him be lovely in all His glorious beauty, and it did not matter so much about the world of created

1 things.”

Miller holds that for Edwards, ’’Beauty gives the

S highest pleasure the mind can know. *

and that ” . . .

1 A. V* G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (Boston and Hew York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company), p. 328* 2 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Hew York, William Sloan Associates, 1949), p* 240*

3

the beautiful is something that the universe aspires toward, , . *,t®

MeGiffert contends that ?, • , the sight of

beautiful in Being in general has

a

tug that pulls a

the man to

it, , • • nothing short of a haunting, fascinating, adorable vision of the whole in all its beauty • • the achievement of true virtue,

4

can

lead

to

And Rhoades concludes that

n . , , few characteristics of Edwards’ thought and writing strike one more forcibly than does the aesthetic quality all but everywhere present,?® of God, Rhoades says;

Also, speaking of the experience

’fit is essentially an aesthetic, rath­

er than a moral experience*?® tiplied many times*

Such quotations could be mul­

Suffice it to say that all the Edwards-

ian scholars agree that beauty was an important component of his thought, although few have troubled themselves to analyse its nature and function* Before citing in Edwards9 works passages

that reveal

the importance of beauty, it is necessary to make reference to Edwards9 great synonym for beauty, Excellency or —

Excel-

p, £41.

^ A, C, MoGiffert, Jonathan Edwards (Hew York and Lon­ don, Harper and Brothers, 1933), p. 19$, $ Donald H* Rhoades, Jonathan Edwards; Experimental Theologian (unpublished Doctoral dissertation, fale univer­ sity, 1946) , p* 194, ® Ibid*, p. 148*

lence.

A good example of Edward*’ practical equating of the

two terms may be seen in his rhetorical question: "Wherein is one thing excellent, and another evil; one beautiful, ant an7 other deformed?" Again, in the statement, . . all the Primary and Original beauty or excellence, that is among 8 Hinds, is Love . . «n the anther obviously uses beauty and Q

excellence interchangeably*7 all his later writings.

Ee seems to follow this rule in

Words that are related to but

not

synonymous with beauty are sueh emotive terms as: glory, de­ light, sweetness, happiness, precious, joy, blessedness, en­ joyment, pleasure and dignity. It seems appropriate to begin this survey with

his

conception of the beauty Of God, since his system is thorough­ ly, even devastatingly, theocentrie.

Earountunian calls

wards the "theologian of the Great Commandment.*

Ed­

"God blessed

Jonathan Edwards,* he says, "with a unique sense and knowledge of His glory. . . . A love of God’s ’infinite perfections’ is the source of the many-sided work of Edwards as a

theologian

^ o i e s on the Mind," in 0. H. Paust and f * H, John­ son, Representative Selections from Jonathan Edwards (Hew York and Cincinaiti, American Book Company, i^b), p.SO. 8 i n a ..

3g.

9 RuBkln, however, see. a difference between beauty and excellency, Excellency, he says, is applied to that which re­ quired a great human power for its production, fhus a poem or symphony is excellent, but never a flower or a tree. See John - Ruskin, Modern Painters (Hew York, J. Wiley, I860), I, 15.

and the clue for understanding both his life and writings,"*^ Edwards' profound sense of the glory and power of God is per­ haps nowhere better seen than in his sermon on "Butins Reso­ lution1?: God is a glorious God* There is none like him, who is infinite in glory and excellency. He is the most high God, glorious in holiness9 fearful in praises, doing won­ ders* His name is excellent in all the earth, and his glory is above the earth and the heavens# , ♦ • God is the fountain of all good, and an inexhaustible fountain; he s an all sufficient God, able to protect and defend them his peopl£] , and to do all things for them, , • . He is a God who hath all things in his hands, and does whatso­ ever he pleases, he killeth and maketh alive; he bringsth down to the grave and bringeth up; he maketh poor and naketh rich; the pillars of the earth are the Lord's* , • • Many that others worship and serve as gods, are cruel be­ ings, spirits that seek the ruin of souls, but this is a God that delighteth in mercy; his grace is infinite and endures forever. He is love itself, an infinite fountain and ocean of it,**

t

Like Anselm, Edwards thought of God as the Being than whom no greater can be conceived.

All the good in the universe must

flow from Him; He is , , . the infinitely holy God, who used always to be es­ teemed by God's people not only virtuous, but a Being in whom is all possible virtue, and every virtue in the most absolute purity and perfection, and in infinitely greater brightness and amiableness than in any other creature; the most perfect pattern of virtue, and the fountain from whom all others' virtue is as beams from the sun#*3 If God is a God of infinite perfections, it follows l5 Joseph Harountunian, "Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Great Commandment," Theology Today, Is361, October, 1044, The Works of President Edwards (Hew York. Leavitt and Allen.TSSh), IvT^i*# ~ ~ 18 Ibid.. II, 84

of th, VJ.U9)'

that He la beautiful.

Biwards was dominated by the concept of

God as a beautiful Being;

"even his passing glimpses of beau-

ty he grounded in the very being of God."

"It was inevitable,"

says Rhoades, . . . that Idwards' apprehension of God should lay stress on the Divine Beauty, so strong was the aesthetic tendency within him* • • • The universe, be ing-in-general, being per se, were to him intrinsically beautiful. How could he find less in the Deity Who comprehended in Himself all being, Who was the Source and Greater of all created beauty? A quantity of being which might not be proportion­ ately beautiful— that was for him unthinkable.** For B&war&s, God was the supremely beautiful Being. . , • In a gracious gratitude men are affected with the attribute of Godts goodness and free grace* not only as they are concerned in it, or as it affects their inter­ est, but as a part of the glory and beauty of God's na­ ture. That wonderful and unparalleled grace of God* which is manifested in the work of redemption, and shines forth in the face of Jesus Christ, is infinitely glorious & it­ self. . . . it is a great part of the moral perfection and beauty of God's nature.** This beauty centers in God's holiness; it is not a mere m e or feeling of the numinous. A tru6 love to God must begin with a delight in his holiness, and not with a delight in any other attribute; for no other attribute is truly lovely without this, and no otherwise than as ^according to our way of conceiving of God) it derives its holiness from this. . . . As the beauty of the divine nature does primarily consist in God's holiness, so does the beauty of the saints, that they are saints, or holy ones; it is the moral image of God in them, which is their beauty. • . .***

% $ McSi'ffert, oj. cit., p. 214. 14 Rhoades, oj>. cit., p. 3b. Works. Ill, 9? ("Treatise on Religious Affections"). 14

Ibid., III, 103 ("Treatise on Religious Affections").

What effect will God’s beauty have upon man?

The di­

vine beauty will be a great stimulus to kindle divine love in men's hearts and to draw them to Him*

Though men should love

God because of the eternal penalty for refusing to do so, for Edwards there is a higher and better reason for loving God. 17 love God, he says, because God is beautiful. In the sermon *11en Haturally God’s Enemies,” Edwards laments the fact that in spite of the beauty and goodness of God many men still remain His enemies. Though ministers use never so many arguments and en­ treaties, and set forth the loveliness of God, and tell them of the goodness of God to them, and hold forth to them God’s own gracious invitation, and entreat them never so earnestly to cast off their opposition and enmity, and to be reconciled, and become friends, yet they can­ not overcome it: still they will be as bad enemies to God as ever they were *3*8 A true saint loves God, not because of the benefits that will come to the God-lover, but simply beeause God's ^eauty and glo< ry kindle love in the heart. The divine excellency and glory of G0d and ^esus Christ * . . is the primary reason why a true saint loves these things; and not any supposed interest that he has in them, or any conceived benefit that he has received from them, or shall receive from them, or any such imag­ ined relation which they bear to his Interest*3*9 Any view of ^dwards that ignores or minimizes this aspect . .. ,A7 ?ee H. G. Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the Unit|g: States (Hew York and Cincinnati, American"‘.Book Clmpany;— “

3*8 Works, IV, 40-41 (”Men Eaturally God s Enemies’’). ^

3^id., III, 92 ("Religious Affections*).

of his thought is false and misleading#

though Edwards

was

willing enough to recognize fear as a motive for love to God, he recognized the divine beauty as the superior and

primary

motive# If God is infinitely glorious and beautiful , then

the

greatest sin is to be contemptuous of that beauty# they lginnersj hear that he is a great God; but they despise his greatness; they look upon him worthy of con* tempt, and treat him accordingly# fhey hear of him by the name of a great King; but his authority they regard not, and sometimes trample upon it for years together.®® fheir [unregenerate men *3] enmity appears in their Judg* ments; in the judgment and esteem they have of God# they have a very mean esteem of God# # ♦ • fhey entertain very low and contemptible thoughts of God# # ♦ ♦ fhey hear God is an infinitely holy, pure, and righteous Being, and they do not like him on this account; they have no relish of such kinds of qualifications; they take no delight in con­ templating them# • • • fhey see no manner of .beauty or loveliness, nor taste any Sweetness in them.8* We cannot understand Edwards* view of the heinousness of sin until we first appreciate the magnitude of sin:

it is

con*

tempt of infinite beauty# So great is the beauty of God, then, that men have no valid excuse if they are His enemies;

God*s excellence

is

such that no man should refuse Elm# In concluding a sermon on ' a stern Calvinistic theme, Edwards waxes remarkably tender as he brings his appeal to the congregation: • e G Ibid## If, 06# ("fhe Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and Intolerable1*)• 81 1M4., IV, 37-38 ("Ken ItoturaXJjr Soft’s Enemies").

$ Eow causelessly you are enemies to God# * , • Ton hare no reason for this from what he is, for he is an infinite­ ly lovely and glorious Being; the fountain of all excel­ lency: all that is amiable and lovely in the universe, is originally and eminently in him# nothing can possibly be conceived of, that could be lovely in God, that is not in him, and that in the greatest possible degree, even in­ finitely #^2 like Paul, Edwards could say that "all the world is guilty be­ fore God#"

Men who despise such beauty deserve whatever pun­

ishment God may have for them in the after-world. Closely associated in Edwards* mind with the glory

of

God was the glory of Christ# Sometimes he grouped the two to­ gether# fhey ^he saintsj do not first see that God loves them, and then see that he is lovely, but they first see that God is lovely, and that Christ is excellent and glorious, and their hearts are captivated with this view. # • #2^ to classify God and Christ together is of course perfectly in harmony with his theology#

More often, however, Edwards

re­

ferred to them separately#

Whereas the beauty of God was the

beauty of infinite majesty and holiness, the beauty of Christ was that of infinite tenderness#^ All the spiritual beauty of his ||hxistfjO human na^ ture, consisting in his meekness, lowliness, patience, heavenliness, love to God, love to men, condescension to

'%£ fb£&#, 17, 68 ("Men Naturally God*8 Enemies1?)# 33 I&id*. II*. H This for to Edwards had justice as phasis, not of

("Beligious Affections??)#

distinction should not be overdrawn, however, God had love as well as majesty, and Christ well as love# The distinction is one of em­ absolute contrast#

the mean and vile, and eompassion.to the miserable, etc*, all is summed up in his holiness*^® At times in Edwards one is reminded of the sermons on Canticles by Bernard of Glairvaux.

in his personal recollections

Ed**

wards referred thus to his early Christian experience; My mind was greatly engaged to spend all my time in read* ing and meditating on Christ, on the beauty and excellency of his person, and the lovely way of salvation by free grace in him* * * . Those words, Cant* 3:1, used to be abundantly with me, I am the Rose of Sharon, and the Lily of the valleys* The words seemed to me sweetly-to repre* sent the loveliness and beauty of Jesus Christ*4* Such an emphasis was sometimes decidedly unpuritanical.

The

beauty of Christ, for him, was so great that it was CTsoul*rav* ishing." . • . Persons under a tsue sense of a glorious and wonder­ ful greatness and excellency of divine things, and soulravishing views of the beauty and love of-Christ, should have the strength of nature overpowered*4 ” With such a view of the beauty of Christ, it is not difficult to see how life's greatest sin, to Edwards, was the rejection of the divine Lover* But if they (gieill do desire it HalvatiojO, this does not argue that they are willing to come to Christ, for notwithstanding their desire to be delivered from hell, yet their hearts do not close with Christ but are averse to him* They see nothing in Christ wherefore they should desire him; no beauty nor comeliness to draw or incline their hearts to him*28 Eh Mdrks, III, 104(^Religious Affections11)

27 Ibid., I, 531 ("Maries of a Work of the Spirit of God*)• 88 Ibid., IV. 57 ("Men Naturally Go^'s Enemies").

At the end of A certain sermon lawards appeals to his hearers?

thus

"let what has been said he improved to

due© you to love the lord Jesus Christ, and choose him

in* for

your friend and p o r t i o n * H e r e is no mention of hell~fire or eternal torment as a motive for belief* peal is made to man’s affective nature;

Instead, the ap~

it is an appeal

love Christ because he is worthy of one’s love*

to

It is a de-

feasible thesis that this emphasis, rather than the stern, condemnatory one, more truly reflects the real Edwards*

the

American literature textbooks, in all fairness, should

sup­

plement "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Cod" (inevitably in­ cluded in su&h texts) with, say* a selection from the trea­ tise on Religious Affections, or a sermon on the beauty Christ*

Or better yet, they would do well to omit

of

entirely

the famous infield sermon* and include only his more positive and forever-valid works*

It is the opinion of this paper that

such an inclusion would not be a violation of the real Edwards It is not surprising that Edwards found beauty also in nature*

If Cod is beautiful, and if God is in nature (both of

which Edwards affirmed), then

nature

isbeautiful*Hehad ear

ly associated worship with the beauties of nature.

In his

' ~ Ibid7, IV, 197. Such an emphasis on the beauty Christ reminds one of the "Crusaders’ Hymn": "fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of all nature! 0 Thou of God and man the Son! Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor, Thou, my soul’s glory, ioy* and crown!"

of

^Personal narrative11 he wrote of an experience of hie youth: I with eome of my echoolmates joined together and built a booth in a swamp, in a very retired spot, for a place of prayer. And besides, I had particular secret places of my own in the woods, where I used to^retire by myself; and was from time to time much affected.?0 Indeed, the whole of his first thirteen years, spent in

the

frontier community of last Windsor, Connecticut, were replete with vivid impressions of nature's wonders• Behind the fam­ ily house the land sloped gently down to a brook, on the other side of which rose a densely-wooded hill.

It was somewhere

along this brook that Edwards built the above-mentioned booth in which he and his companions would meditate and pray.

It

was here also that he made his now famous observations on the habits of spiders.

In the light of modern psychology’s empha­

sis on the extreme Importance of early childhoodo on subse­ quent human development, one is tempted to speculate as to how Edwards’ mature thought would have developed had he been rear­ ed in an urban area such as Boston or Hew York, fhbre is streng probability that his sense of naturefs beauties would

have

been diminished, if not destroyed, by an urban childhood. In many ways he was fortunate, not only for what he missed, but for what he gained by such isolation. Ho won­ der the beauty and majesty of nature stamped themselves unforgettably on his early thought. In such a setting nature would have been the most important daily fact to a sensitive child. With a horizon in all four directions he could hardly have escaped impressions of a spacious

J

13 world; a world of meadows# unending forests, the river; a world^of ever changing beauty, not a world of man's making,®! B&war&s* modern interpreters are agreed that a sense of the wonder and beauty of nature dominates his thought#

"* • ♦

he loved that world, and his passion for it dominated even his most abstract reasoning# # • # the indirect perceptions

of

beauty # • . took the form of a direct perception of types He was a Romantic, a pre -Wordwor thian in his nature-mystic ism*35 this love of nature's beauties that is well-nigh uitous in Sdwards * thought may be seen with clarity in "Personal narrative#"

ubiq­ his

After describing some of the non-Calvin-

istic attitudes of his early childhood, he reveals his emotion­ al state upon his first realisation of the true glory of God# The first instance that I remember of that sort of in­ ward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was on reading those words, I Tim# 1* If. How unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only"wTse dodT’Tfe honor and glory for ever and ever, Imeh J5i As I rea!T~the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused in it,a sense of the glory of the SI 61a k. Winslow, Jonathan Kdwards (Hew York, Mac­ millan Company, 1940), pp*33-?&* Hot only the quotation but many of the facts in this paragraph are from Winslow* Perry Miller, editor, Images and Shadows of Divine Things (Hew Haven, Yale University Press, 1948), p.“T?8T" 33 The following statement is typical; "* • * all the beauty to be found diffused throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fulness of brightness and glory." From Works, II, 266 ("The Wature of True Virtue")• 34 Italics in the original#

Mvine Being; a new sense, quite different from any­ thing I had ever experienced before. Sever any words of scripture seemed to me as these words did* I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how hap­ py I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up in him for ever All this relates, it is true, to the beauty and glory of God, not of nature.

But it was in nature that Edwards saw, in

a

supreme sense, the glory of God* Not long after I began to experience these things, I gave an account to my father of some things that had passed in my mind. I was pretty much affected by the dis course we had together; and when the discourse was ended I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father’s pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express .So After this experience he began to see increasingly the beauty of God in nature. God’s excellency, hie wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flow­ ers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for continuance; and in the day, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the mean time, singing forth, with a low voice my contemplations of the Greator %nd Redeemer. . . . I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunder storm; and used to take the op­ portunity, at such times, to fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder, which often* times was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet

1 ' ''lu138 Personal Harrative,n in faust and Johnson, op. cit., p. 09.

14 contemplations of my great and glorious G o d . ^ It is possible to see Edwards* love for nature also in his-frequent use of nature -metaphor s.

That Jesus was rural

and Paul urban may be seen easily from their respective meta­ phors:

the former thought in terms of the sower, the mustard*

seed and the fig-tree;

the latter in terms of the market­

place, the arena and the battlefield.

In the same way,

wards* preoccupation with nature *s beauties appears in metaphors,

Ed­ his

The following is typical of his mode of expres­

sion: , ♦ • it (holiness] appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleas*? ant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought an in­ expressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravish­ ment to the soul. In other words, it made the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner of pleasant flow­ ers; all pleasant, delightful, and undisturbed; enjoying a sweet calm, and the gently vivifying beams of the sun, The soul of a true Christian, as I then wrote in my medi­ tations, appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosem to receive the pleasant beams of the sun*s glory; rejoicing as it were in a calm rap­ ture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peace­ fully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms, to in the light of the sun,39 Similar examples might be taken from almost any but the most argumentative sections of his works. Perhaps the most striking example of Edwards * love

2>1 Ibid,, p, dl. Ibid., p. 63.

of

15 nature*8 beauty is an extract from a ^§ragment which concludes with the astounding confession that **♦ . . the Puritan priest who so unpityingly consigned the Visible world to an ultimate conflagration on the Pay of Judgment thoroughly comprehended that men hate to die because they cannot bear to let go

the

beauty of the world.*^ • * ♦ the reason why almost all men, and those that seem to be very miserable, love life, because they cannot bear to lose sight of such a beautiful and lovely world* the ideas, that every moment whilst we live have a beauty that we take not distinct notice of, brings a pleasure that, when we come to the trial, we had rather live in much pain and misery than lose *40 Surely this does not sound like the man who wrote ^Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God1*! In connection with Edwards * love of nature the question inevitably arises; was Edwards a pantheist? swers in the affirmative.

McGiffert

an­

For Edwards, he says,

God is not only the artist creating a world out of nothing; he is also a spring of water that by its very nature must bubble over and increase. God cannot help ex­ panding. His being has a tendency to spread itself. His fullness will not be contained. . . . thus the world rep­ resents the bubbling-over of the divine nature• * • , Ob­ viously we have here the basis of Edwards’ equation of God and the general system of existence. God is the total order of things, for it has proceeded from him.** But McGiffert qualifies his statement by saying that though most pantheists have minimised the significance of personality 49 Perry Miller, Images and Shadows, p. .40. M i * . P. 137. £1 McGiffert, op.cit.. p. 180.

His mind passed back and forth with no apparent jolt or difficulty from a pantheistic to a personalistic inter­ pretation of God. On the one hand the world ip an eman­ ation from God# On the other hand the world is a creature of God, a divine manufacture, *a machine which God has made for his own use.* Edwards perceived no incongruity between the two interpretations. It seems not to have dawned on him that there is a contradiction in speaking of God as at the same time a person and an expansive sub­ stance .42 Rhoades disagrees, however#

Quoting Edwards1 statement

from *Hotes on the Mind* that ”. • . w e always find this,

by

running of it up, that God and Real Existence are the same,* he says: EdwardsT thinking is plainly pan-entheistic• . . . Cer­ tainly , he was not a pantheist in the manner of those who indiscriminately identify all reality with God# It is sometimes said of Edwards that he was a pantheist, some­ times that he was hot a pantheist, sometimes that he fluc­ tuated between the two positions.*# This seems the more fair evaluation.

Certainly Edwards had a

pantheistic tendency, and in certain places could easily pass for Splnosa*

But it is not consistent with the

whole range

of his thought to say unqualifiedly that he was a pantheist. If one may judge a thinker by isolated quotations, it is pos­

sible to call Calvin a pantheist: witness his statement that *. . . the expression that nature is God may be used in a pi-

45 IbfUr. p. 181. 4# Rhoades, 02 ,. cit., p. 6.

1? ous sense by & pious mind* • * ."44 non •pantheistic than was Calvin.

But no one could be more

It is equally erroneous

to

label Edwards a pantheist. Some aestheticians may raise the question whether it is correct to call the appreciation of naturefs beauty "aesthetic appreciation."

Granted, however, that the appreciation of

a

sunset on the ocean differs from that of a symphony or a paint­ ing, do we not recognize common elements in both?

Is not

ap­

preciation of natural beauty prerequisite— logically and chron­ ologically— to the appreciation of the arts? Some contemplation and appreciation of the beautiful aspects of nature is not only prior in time to artf but is a condition of its genesis. The enjoyment of the pleasing aspects of land and sea, of mountain and dale, of the innumerable organic forms, has steadily grown with the devel­ opment of culture; and this growth, though undoubtedly aided by that of the feeling for art— especially painting and poetry— is to a large extent independent of it.45 If the beauty of a symphony or a painting is aesthetic, the beauty of nature is pre-aesthetic.

then

If painting, sculpture,

music, literature and the dance are the arts, then nature

is

art in its essence— the lake Itasca from which the Mississippi of the arts has flowed. Hot only creation but providence Edwards viewed in terms 44 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia, Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1934), I, 69. 45 James Sully, "Aesthetics," Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, I, 281.--------------------------------

18 of beauty.

Providence shows God to be a God of

order

and

beauty. Renee we see what a consistent thing^ divine providence is. fhe consideration of what has been said may greatly serve to show us the consistency, order and beauty, of God's works of providence.4© In the light of the Scripture, the events of providence

ap-

pear as . . . an orderly series of events, all wisely ordered and directed in excellent harmony and consistence, tending all to one end. * • , All God's works of providence, in all ages, meet.in one at last, as so many lines meeting in one centre.v? It is "fit1?that

God should be the moral Governor of the

uni­

verse. Any other scheme would lack "equality" or "proportion,**/ and would therefore not be beautiful.

As this moral Governor,

God orders and directs all events, bringing them to "meet one at last,"

fhus God's beauty is seen in both the

universe, in nature;

in

spatial

and in the temporal universe, in events.

We have seen that God is beautiful in Himself, and that His beauty fills both space and time.

But what effect

God's beauty have upon the world of humanity?

will

Simply this;

the saints will be made beautiful by God's beauty. fhey She saintJJ have spiritual excellency and joy by a kind of participation of God, fhey are made excellent by a communication of God's excellency; God puts his own 1 ' '‘ 46 Works, I, 510 ("Work of Redemption1?)• 47

I. §11 ("Work of Redemption").

beauty, i* e*, M s beautiful likeness, upon their souls: they are made partakers of the divine nature, or moral image of God, Z Bet# i. 4* • . * The saints are beautiful and blessed by a communication of God*a holiness and Joy, as the moon and planets are bright by the sunVs light • « When one's character is right a moral beauty will follow*

In

his diary, under the date of Saturday night, May 4, appears the following resolution: 0 that God would help me to discern all the flaws and defects of my temper and conversation, and help me in the difficult work of btfabhding them; and that he would fill me so full of Christianity, that the foundation of all those disagreeable irregularities.may be destroyed, and the contrary beauties may follow# ^ Furthermore, God's beauty in the world excites one to religious affections;

beauty is the divinely-appointed stimulus to

a

love for divine things* The knowledge which the saints have of God's beauty and glory in the world, and those holy affections that arise from it, are of the same nature and kind with what the saints are the subject of in heaven, differing only In det gree and circumstances*®® Not only the beauty of God in nature, but the beauty of music and poetry, are intended to excite man's religious affections* the duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed Wholly to excite and express religious affections* No other reason can be aligned why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music, but only that such is our nature and frame, that these 48 tforks, IT, 1T4 (^God Glorified in Han's Nependenee*)*

&

Ibid** I*

Italics not in the original*

50 Ibid.. Ill, 2$ {"Religion* Affection*").

things hay© a tendency to move our affections.^. Thus even for Idwards there was a place for "the arts* In wor^ ship* There is In Edwards a close relation between Joy beauty.

and

from one standpoint, joy is the mediator between di­

vine beauty and beauty in the human mind*

The process begins

with divine beauty, the perception or apprehension of which brings Joy. True saints have their minds . . • inexpressibly pleased and delighted with the sweet idea of the glorious and ami­ able nature of the things of Sod# And this is the spring of all their delights, and the cream of all their pleas* ures: it is the Joy of their Joy. This sweet and ravish­ ing entertainment they have in the view of the delightful and beautiful nature pf divine things, is the foundation of the Joy they have afterwards . W Then human Joy, at first an effect, becomes a cause;

it beau­

tifies the mind. In rejoicing with this joy, their minds were filled, as it were, with a glorious brightness, and their natures ex­ alted and perfected. It was a most worthy, noble rejoic­ ing, that did not corrupt and debase the mind, as many car­ nal joys do; but did greatly beautify and dignify it.no Thus whatever beauty there is in man, li&e the beauty in

na­

ture and providence, is not a self-caused, independent beauty. Bather is it a dependent beauty, an effect of the original, un* 5i tbllV, III, lb ("Religious Affections"), sa Ibid., Ill, 98 ("Religious Affections"). 53 Ibid.. Ill, 8 ("Religious Affections").

caused divine beauty• grandchild;

Beauty of the mind is therefore

its father is joy, and its grandfather

a

divine

beauty# Even human trials and sorrows can be justified on basis of beauty#

the

Using a variation of a familiar argument,

Edwards says that trials will (a) bring to light the "smiableness* of true religion, and (b) increase its beauty.

Adversi-

ties • # • tend to cause the amiableness of true religion to appear to the best advantage # . • and not only so, but they tend to increase its beauty# # ♦ . A s gold that is tried in the fire, is purged from its alloy, and all re­ mainders of dross, and comes forth more solid and beautl* ful; so true faith being tried as gold is tried in the fire, becomes more precious#^* Thus far Edwards* teaching on certain specific

sub­

jects has been surveyed, in order to show the high aesthetic content of the various tenets of his system#

Another way to

demonstrate the importance of beauty to his thinking is study his choice of words.

to

If beauty is integral to his think­

ing, one would expect to find the word and its synonyms $uasi-synonyms used many times#

or

The sermons, rather than the

philosophical and theological polemics, have been chosen

for

this study, because they are shorter and thus more convenient 54 "ibid#, III, 1 ("Religious Affections")# Such res* soning may strike one as rationalization; but it has been Stated, in one form or another, many times#

22 for analysis, and also because they are less likely

to

“slanted* In a certain direction than are the longer

be

works#

Of course, even the sermons are usually “slanted* in one the other direction, i. e.f they tend to express either

or the

“fear of Sod** or the “beauty of God“ aspect of his preaching. therefore three sermons will be analyzed, one “neutral,11 one representing the warm, experiential side of Edwards, and one ' the stern Galvinistic side. Our concern will be for only the beauty-related words, since the world knows all too well the brimstone-related words# the sermon “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence* an especially good one with which to commence.

seems

It is perhaps

the most “neutral* sermon of Edwards * that can be found; is fairly short and thus convenient for study;

and it

it rer

veals the mind of the still-youthful Edwards, being his first published sermon. In 1731 he was honored by an invitation to preach at the “public lectures in Boston# His vigorous sermon with its specific rejection of unorthodox views so delighted the leading Calvinistic ministers that they persuaded him to let them print it. Thereafter scarcely a year passed in which he did not publish a sermon, a tract, or a book.pp Following is a list of the beauty-related words found in this sermon.

Though many of them may seem not directly related to

beauty, for Edwards they all express aspects of a great whole. The number after the word indicates the number of times £& McGiffert, op* cit., p.39.

the

word appears, including the verbal and adjectival forma,

as

well as the nouual*^ Glory Excellency Happiness Beauty Enjoyment Joy Pleasure Blessedness Delight Dignity Preciousness

37 16 7 6 5 5 3 4 a 1 1

Representing the warm, experiential Aide of Edwards is the sermon "The Excellency of Christ,"

The beauty-related

words, and the number of times they appear, are as follows? Excellency Glory Enjoyment Dignity Sweetness Beauty Happiness

64 37 10 6 6

B 3

It is true that one would expect the word "excellency" to ap­ pear many times, since it is in the sermon title;

also it is

true that this sermon is more than twice as long as "God Glor­ ified in Han's Dependence*"

But still the number of times the

word appears is impressive*

It may strike one as strange that

the word "beauty" appears but twice (and only six times "God Glorified in Han's Dependence")*

in

It should be noted, how­

ever, that the idea of beauty occurs much more frequently than the word itself*

Edwards seems to have preferred the synonym

56 This sermon appears in Works, IV, BZ ff *

*excellency* to the tern "beauty* itself,

perhaps to make

the latter term more meaningful by its infrequent use* Though beauty underlies all his thought, it is often not mentioned by name. w Hepresenting the stern* Galvinistic side of Edwards' thought is the sermon "The Eternity of Hell Torments," Glory

Blessedness Excellency

1 1

One would not expect to find a large number of beauty-related words in such a sermon.

Admittedly the number is not

But the frequent use of "glory" demands explanation*

large• Edwards

saw God's glory as including all His attributes, even His jus­ tice*

Therefore the exercising of His justice, including the

punishment of sinners, is "glorious#"

In a sense it is

even

beautiful or excellent, in that it provides a balance for the attribute of love.

In this sense the "eternity of hell

tor­

ments" reveals the glory of God.**0

For the identification of beauty with excellency, see his "Eotes on the Mind." 58 This sermon appears in Works, IV, 179-301. 88 "Pleasure" in the sense of "God's good pleasure," meaning His will, was not counted; but only pleasure as en­ joyment. 80 This sermon appears in Works, IV, 366-279.

CHAPTER XI THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY TO THE EDWARDS IAN SYSTEM Basic to Edwards * whole system of thought Is the cept of proportion.

con­

It is the contention of this paper

this concept underlies all of Edwards? thinking;

more funda­

mental than the foundation, it is the ground on which foundation itself rests.

that

the

Though sometimes explicitly and o-

vertly present in Edwards* argumentation, it is more often im~ plicit and only ihterpretatively seen;

it is the subsoil, not

the soil, but of which his thought grows.

One may indeed

justified in questioning whether or not Edwards himself

was

conscious of employing the idea of proportion or symmetry often as he did.

Probably he was not.

be

as

But there is evidence

that deep down below the level of his consciousness there ex­ isted (or subsisted) a passionate fondness for pictorial, geo­ metric relationships.^

It may be significant that his

very

early compositions, "Of Insects1* (written at the age of eleven, it is generally thought2 ) and "Of the Rainbow,1? both contain geometrical representations; and that his "Notes am the Mind," written during his college years (1716-17EO), contains different geometric illustrations, actually drawn.

three

Such a tend­

ency, if it did exist below the level of consciousness, probably encouraged by the study of geometry at Yale;

was at the

1 Edwards often used geometrical and mathematical terms. 2 G, H* Faust and T. H. Johnson, Representative Selections from Jonathan Edwards (New York and Cincinnati,"“American fioofc Company, 1935), p. 417.

end of his junior year he wrote his father a letter

asking

him to get him n . .♦ . Alstead's Geometry and Gassendus* tronomy;

As­

with which I would intreat you to get a pair of di­

viders or mathematician^ compasses, and a scale, which absolutely necessary in order to learning mathematics; also, the Art of

Thinking*

*3

are and

Evidence will he presented

to

show that to Edwards the art of thinking was always related to *a pair of dividers* and *a scale*;

that his philosophy

and theology were developed basically in terms of relation­ ship, geometrically conceived. Several different terms are used when the idea of pro-* portion is overtly expressed.

Perhaps the technical word for

it would be consent, as in the following: Such is, as it were, the mutual consent of the differ­ ent parts of the periphery of a circle, or surface of Aa sphere, and of the corresponding parts of an ellipsis.* Other words that express the same basic idea are harmony, or­ der, proportion, condignity, fitness, right, propriety, cord, eongruity, agreement and relation.

con­

More important than

the actual terms used, however, are the geometric patterns which are their basis.

At least three such patterns

may be

discerned:^ ** 3 A. C. McGiffert, Jonathan Edwards (Hew York and Lon­ don, Harper and Brothers, , p. * ©ie Works of President Edwards (Hew York, Leavitt ---and AllenTTaWTlIf/iro-'lIl'. ® fo be discussed in detail later in Chapter II*

Z1

Correspondenc e . According to this pattern, events end relations in onearea of human experience must corresponds or be analogous to, events and relations in other areas* Centrality* In this pattern the different aspects of reality and experience are related in and by a central ob­ ject; opposites and contraries are brought together* Balance* Basically this pattern consists in the fear of lopsidedness* Edwards could not bear to see one side of the human experience-reality scale more heavily weight­ ed than the other* Of the very early essays written by Edwards as a boy, perhaps *0f Insects*— the essay on spiders— has attracted the greatest attention.

One is amazed at the precocity of

the

boy, who reminds one of such childhood and boyhood geniuses as Mozart, who composed music at the age of six; Bizet,

who

wrote his First Symphony at the age of seventeen; and Shostekovitoh, who gave his First Symphony to the world at the age of nineteen*

Another ofthe early essays is

which *♦ * • looks as if

*0f the Bainbew,*

it had beenwritten not much

later

than *0f Insects,* and is generally thought to belong the same early period.***

to

fhis essayreveals a decided inter­

est in the geometrical representation of proportion or rela­ tionship* In its central section he draws an illustration upon which he comments*

fhe illustration and his comments,

respectively, are given belcw.

% Faust and Johhson, op.cit.. p* 417* All of the boy­ hood essays of Edwards are found in this reference*

as

the Hext thing that Wants a solution is what should Clause the Reflection to he circular, or which is the same thing what should Cause the Reflection to he Just at such a distance everywhere from the Point that is opposite to the sun, and no reflection at all from the Drops that are within or without that Circle £) Why should not all the Drops that are within the Circle Reflect as many rays as those that are in the circle Bj or where the Circle is to Resolve this we must Consider this One law of Reflection and Refraction to wit If the Reflecting body be Perfectly Reflexive the Angle of Reflexion will be the same as the Angle will be less than the Angle of incidence* £0 By a body Perfectly Reflexive I mean one that is so Solid as Perfectly to Resist the strobe of the incident body and not to Give way to it at all, and by an imperfectly Re­ flexive a body that Gives way and Does not Obstinately Resist the strobe of the incident Body CO so I say that If the body a* b. be Perfectly Reflexive and Does not Give way at all to the strobe of the incident Ray c. d*

89 It will reflect by an angle that shall be equall to that by which it fell upon the body &• b. from d# to e* but if the body a* b. is not able to Resist the stroke of the Ray c. d* but Gives way to it it will neither be able to Reflect by so big an angle but will Reflect it it may be by the line d. f • or d. g. according as the Reflexive force of a. b. be greater or lesser* and the bare Con­ sideration of this will be enough to convince any man for we know that there is need of greater force by a Great angle than by a little one. It is not difficult to see in this excerpt a literal geometric expression of concepts in whose molds Edwards

was w later to pour his theological and philosophical thought*' At least two of these concepts are apparent: 1. Equal relationship, or centrality: "What should cause the Reflections to be Just at such a distance every* where from the point that is opposite to the sun?1? 8 * Correspondence: "If the body a* b* is not able to Resist the stroke of the Ray c* d* but Gives way to it it will neither be able to reflect by so big an angle but will Reflect it it may be by the line d* f. or d* g* ac­ cording as the Reflexive force of a. b. be greater or lesser*1* It may strike one as a futile exercise to find such an­ ticipations of Edwards the theologian in Edwards the boy. mitted!y, such an emphasis could easily be exaggerated. in the light of modern psychological findings concerning

Ad­ But the

extreme importance of early childhood to adult thought and be­ havior, the danger would seem to lie in the other

direction.

And if the pattern of human development is indeed from

the

i Geometric illustrations appear frequently in Edwards1 later works. For example: "Such is the mutual agreement of the various sides of a square, or equilateral triangle, or of a regular polygon*1* In Works, II, 878 (^fhe Hature of frue Virtue*).

grossly literal {as in childhood) to the figurative

of sym­

bolic (as in normal adult life), the contention of this paper that a possible mathematical, geometric strain in Edwards* theological writings was anticipated in a literal sense

in

his childhood essays, seems to be a reasonable assumption. these childhood essays raise an interesting fuestion: would Edwards have been a great scientist if he had had the op­ portunity?

Was his a scientific mind?

Many have said

that

his fault was to be born in a pre-scientific or non-seientific age:

^Edwards might have made a great name for himself

in

natural science had he not been born a century too soon."^® But this same writer, after admitting Edwards * scientific po­ tential, qualifies his original statement by saying that "• • . it may be doubted whether Edwards would have become a great ■y' scientist even had the circumstances been more favorable C. H. Faust goes further, attempting to show that n. . . in spite of a thin vein of scientific interest and of some

re­

markable powers of observation, Edwardsr early dedication

to

theology makes untenable the oft-repeated belief that he might have been ’a remarkable scientific o b s e r v e r . F a u s t

and

Johnson are probably close to the truth in saying that Edwards had **• • . a capacity for thinking directly in terms of what* ~

S MeCxiffert, oj>. cit., pp. 17 t 18* ^ Ibid., p. IB. Faust and Johnson, og. cit., p. cxxv.

si ever subject he undertook to study#*11

According to this in­

terpretation, his early scientific essays show, not any

nat­

ural genius for science, but his unusual adaptibility. One of the things of which Edwards was most sure

was

that God is a lover of order and a hater of chaos* He is a wise Being, and delights in order, and not con­ fusion, and that things should be together or asunder ac­ cording to their nature; and his making such a constitu­ tion is a testimony of his law of order#12 In discussing God's moral government of the world, Edwards gues that the alternative belief is that Godleft much

ar­

of the

world to chaos, which to him is unthinkable# If there is

no

moral government, he argues, then # . • the God of order, peace and harmony* that constituted the inferior parts of the world * ♦ • in such decency b e a u ­ ty and harmony, will appear to haye left the chief part of his work, and the end of all the rest, tothe reign of everlasting discord, confusion and ruin#l* It can be argued reasonably that Edwards* extreme view of the will also was rooted in this same basic notion of God as God of order#

the

An undetermined will would mean nothing but a

universe of unrestrained freedom whose result would be chaos*

The notion mankind have conceived of liberty, is some dignity of privilege, something worth claiming# But what dignity or privilege is there, in being given up to such a wild eontingenee as this, to be perfectly and constantly H

jh 1 C . p. dlf* SSS£*t IV# W

(*Justification by Faith Alone*)•

15 Ibid.. II, 85 ("Freedom of the Will").

liable to act unintelligently and unreasonably, and as mubh without the guidance of understanding, as if we had none or were as destitute of perception, as the smoke that is driven hy the wind.** In view of Edwards1 basic dislike of chaos or disorganisation, one wonders what would have been his attitude toward

organic

evolution had it been known in his day» or had he lived than a century later#

more

Insofar as evolution supports teleology

he would probably have favored it.

But insofar as it involves

primeval chaos and tremendous wastage of life he probably would have opposed it, for undoubtedly he would have had difficulty in reconciling such concepts with his basic concept of God as an ordered Being, indeed, as the ordered Being# Also,

it

would be interesting, were it possible, to read his comments on Genesis i; 3 — "The earth was without form and void, darkness was upon the face of the deep#"

The idea of

and form­

lessness and chaos surely do not fit in his system as it is# Whether he would have made a place for them hadthey

been

known*^ in his.day is a moot question, however# Wature, to Edwards, is a supreme exhibition of design and order#

God, the great artist, has made it replete

with

diverse exhibitions of His work, ail of which reveal the art“

Id ibid#", W, 567 (*!0f God’s Moral Government1*)#

IS in a sense, of course, evolution had been known since pre-Christian times# But it did not excite wide at­ tention until the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, in 1859 # Works, I, 566 ("Of God’s Moral Government")#

33 let’s interest in order end proportion# It is evident, by the manner in which God has formed and constituted other things, that he has respect to beau­ ty and harmony, so in the system of the worlds # in the seasons of the year, in the formation of plants, and of the various parts of the human body*18 Everything in nature has a place to fill, a function to per­ form*

Eo part of nature is useless or unnecessary#

it

all

goes to make up the universal design or proportion* It is observable in all kinds of God’s creatures that we behold, that they have those properties and qualities, which are in every way proportional to their end; so that they need no more, they stand in need of no greater de­ gree of perfection, in order to answer the special use for which they seem to be designed* the brute creatures, birds, beasts, fishes and insects, though there be innum­ erable kinds of them, yet all seem to have such a degree of perception and perfection given them, as best suits their place in the creation, their manner of living, and the ends for which they were made* There is no visible defect in them; they are perfect in their kind; there seems to be nothing wanting in order to their filling up their alloted place in the world*1” This is a high teleology* everything is ordered*

nothing in nature is out of place;

If this is true of nature, God’s hand­

iwork, it must be true also of the Creator Himself*

Clearly,

this has important implications for Edwards’ idea of the be­ ing of God, and of being in general*18 Eature is ordered and symmetrical. 15

But there is that

Works, I, 566 (ft0f God’s Moral Government” ).

17 ibid*, IV, 29 (*Man’s Batura! Blindness in Things of Religion” )* 18

To be discussed later*

the

34 in nature which violates the rule; harmony, disproportion, chaos#

there is disorder,

dis­

This Edwards calls sin.

sin is to violate, in some way, the laws of proportion; is %

To sin

* # a blindness and perversity whereby men see the great

as little, the beautiful as negligible, the holy as undesirable, the glorious as a dull and despicable t h i n g . E d w a r d s would have agreed perfectly with William Templefs statement to the students of Oxford University: The world, as we live in it, Is like a shop window in which some mischievous person has got in overnight and shifted all the price labels round, so that the cheap things have the high-price labels on them and the really precious things are priced low.20 Basically, sin is the undervaluing of lifefs high things the overvaluing of life's low things.

and

To sin is to regard or

value an entity in other than its true cosmic relationship. ^ This is true in all areas of life, but especially in religious values#

If a sin is great in proportion to the excellency of

the person or value sinned against, then the greatest sin

of

all is to refuse to accord Christ the position that is right­ fully Bis. 19 Joseph Earountunian, *Jonathan Edwards; Theologian of the Great Commandment," Theology Today, 1:370, October, 1944. Quoted in H. E. Fosdick, A Great Time to Be Alive (New York and London, Harper and Brothers , 1944), pTTlW. ^ 2* it would not be a far step from such an emphasis to a kind of naturalism such as empirical theism, according to which man lives in a universe of value, and must live accord­ ing to those values.

35 Consider how great and excellent that person is, whom you thus set at naught. Contempt of any person is heinous in proportion to the worthiness and dignity of the person contemned* * * • Vou dislike it much to be con­ temned by your equals; but you would take it yet more grievously to be despised by your inferiors, by those who TsicJ on every account you much excel# What a crime is it then for a vile, sinful worm, to set at naught him who Is the brightness of the glory of the King of Kings For Edwards, then, sin has a quantitative as well as a quali­ tative aspect#

Presumably it would be a greater crime to mur­

der a king than one of his lowliest subjects;

it would

be

worse to pick the pocket of a pastor than of a criminal* This blending of the quantitative and the qualitative occurs fre­ quently in Edwards, and presents special problems, especially in aesthetics# Proportion, besides being basic to Edwards * structure, is also a test of truth.

thought-

A religion or system of

thought is true insofar as it is proportionate or symmetrical* "False religion is wont to be maimed and monstrous, and

not

to have that entireness and symmetry of parts, which is seen in true religion*"2^

Heresy is bad because it disproportions

the gospel, thus detracting from its true glory# Whatever other way any scheme is inconsistent with our entire dependence on God for all * * * it is repugnant to the design and tenor of the gospel, and jobs it of that which God accounts its lustre and glory****

ZZ WofEs. IF, abb ("Unbelievers Contemn the Glory and Excellencyof Christ")• 23 Ibid** IV, 178 ("God Glorified in Man's Dependence")* Loo* cit*

McSiffert points out that this is a test

• * which 0hris-

tianity as a whofce has infrequently employed* • . • The

ap­

plication to religion of the test of symmetry is out of

the

ordinary*"25

But while it is seldom made a formal test,

as

Edwards made it, in colloquial usage it often becomes a prac­ tical test of truth or conduct* is unbalanced11;

Thus we says

"His thinking

or, "He has a disorderly mind";

is an extreme view";

or, "That

or, "His argument is one-sided";

"He magnifies that out of all due proportion*"

In a

ort sense,

Edwards merely formalised a criterion that had long been ob­ served#2^ In the next several pages the three basic geometric patterns which seem to underlie Edwards* thought will be pre­ sented*

This material is offered, not as proof that Edwards

thought in geometric terms* but simply as being consistent with the already-established fact that in some areas Edwards thought in terms of proportion and logical relationship* That 85 iiOGiffert, Og> ci t ** pp* 78-79*

Students of primitive languages are aware that ab­ stract nouns such as justice are often represented by pic?torial, schematic words*

^ "If uniformity and proportion," says Edwards, "be the things that affect, and appear agreeable to, this decondary) sense of beauty, then why should not uniformity and pro­ portion affect the same sense in Immaterial things as well as material, if there be equal capacity of discerning it in both? M&d indeed more In spiritual things, as these are more im­ portant than things merely external and material?" From Works, II, 874-75 ("The Wature of True Virtue").

he thought in these terms in ell areas is* however, mere hy­ pothesis, unproved and perhaps unprovable.

But this

paper

Will present evidence that may make the hypothesis tenable. 1.

Correspondence

Basic to Edwards* thought is the concept that our uni­ verse is one of relatedness.

One implication of this for him

is that there is correspondence between the different areas of reality and experience.

Punishment for sin must be

eter­

nal, for example, since anything less would not correspond to the infinite gravity of the sin. Sin is heinous enough to deserve such a n eternal pun­ ishment, and such a punishment is no more than proportionable to the evil or demerit of sin. If the evil of sin be infinite, as the punishment is, then it is manifest that the punishment is no more than proportionable to the sin punished, and is no more than sin deserves* . . . There is no evading the force of this reasoning, but by denying that Cod, the sovereign of the universe, is in­ finitely glorious; Which I presume none of my hearers will adventure to do.28 Again, in discussing fitness Edwards states that two kinds of fitness exist— moral and natural.

Moral fitness is the "moral

excellency" of a person for a state.

As for natural fitness,

. • « a person has a natural fitness for a state, when it appears meet and condecent that he should be in such a state of circumstances, only from the natural concord or agreeableness there is between such qualifications and such circumstances; not because the qualifications are lovely or unlovely, but only because the qualifications and the circumstances are like one another, or^do in their nature, suit or agree or unite one to another &'8' tforks, IV, 267 ("The Eternity of Hell Torments" ).

^

Ibid., IV, 72 (*Justification by Faith Alone").

Natural fitness, then, consists in the correspondence of the "qualifications* and the "circumstances**

The natural order

is • ♦ • a manifestation of (e |his regard to the beauty of that order that there is in uniting those things that have a natural agreement, and congruity, and unition the one With the other,5° Of special interest in connection with Edwards’ gener­ al concept of correspondence is his view of the nature function of analogy*

and

There are in the natural world many an­

alogies to realities in the spiritual world*

"God has

been

pleased to make this kind of consent and agreement as a beau­ tiful and grateful vision to all intelligent beings--an image, as it were, of the true spiritual, original beauty which

is

Sod.*31 While this emphasis is discernible all through ©Swards’ works, it is most definitive in a work to which Edwards various titles;

"The Images of Divine Things,*

of Divine Things,*

gave

"The Shadows

"The Book of Nature and Common Providence,"

"The language and Lessons of Nature*"

The manuscript,

cer­

tainly in its surviving form never meant to he published, con­ tains 21Z numbered entries *

It was to be part of a monumental

work, "National Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Ibid*\ IT, 73 ("Justification by PAith Alone")* A* T* G* Allen, Jonathan Edwards (Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, }, pp, 324-325*

39 Religion Attempted*”

Many of the ideas were jotted down hur­

riedly and are mere fragments;

they were only the seeds

of

ideas which his crowded life did not permit him to formally develop*

Yet there is reason to think that

• . • these rough notes are the draft of an idea funda­ mental to Edwards# thinking* Crude and abrupt, they are in effeet a spiritual autobiography. . . . The theme of the "Images* carries us to the very heart of Edwards1 system.^ The culture into which Edwards was born was character­ ized on the literary side by a loose use of tropes.

As Miller

sayst The sun itself could be made to serve as a simile not only of the resurrection but of the Reformation, of Godvs mercy to those who stayed away from taverns, of a success­ ful harvest, or of divine approbation upon the accession of Gfeorge I to the British throne.*3 Such literary license troubled Edwards•

The relationship be-?

tween the mindfs idea and nature *s object must be closer more rigid than that.

and

*There must now be established, he per­

ceived, a closer alliance between the two realms of being, the object in nature or the event in history, and the thesis the mind.

in

Henceforth the object would enjoy as much claim to

authority as the thesis*"^

Ho longer would it be sufficient

to find in nature mere tropes, which are correspondences only 32 ?erry Miller, editor, Images and Shadows of Blvlne Things (Hew Haven, Yale University Press, IffdS), p#”lf* 3 3 £bii.,

P.

J.7

n . * * between the thing end the associations it happens

to

excite in the impressionable but treacherous senses of men**^® Bather must we find in nature true types t

which are w * . •

rigorous correspondences, not mere chance reserablenees, tween the representation and the antitype**3? nature are like the types in the Bible:

the types

be­ in

*in nature, said Ed­

wards, the agreement between the animal creation and the di­ vine idea would be exactly the same kind of agreement as be­ tween the types of the Old Testament and their antitype •ft38 In the 26th image, says Miller, Edwards goes so far as to sug­ gest that if men can properly discover, or rediscover, nature, they may be enabled to employ objects taken from the consti­ tution of the world no longer merely as illustrations of their meaning, but as illustrations and evidences of the truth

of

what they say*39 Christ often makes use of representations of spiritual things in the constitution of the world for argument, as thus? the tree is known by its fruit* These things are not merely mentioned as illustrations of his meaning, but 35 ibld»\ P*

36 it pleases God to observe analogy in ail his works, as is manifest in fact in innumerable instances* • • • He has constituted the external world in an analogy to things in the spiritual world, in numberless instances*11 Works,11*273* 37 Siller, Images and Shadows, pp* 6-7* 88 59 m a . , p*

27*

as illustrations and evidences of the truth of what says**9

he

Edwards was hy no means the first Christian thinker to emphasise the role of analogy in thought.

One of the greatest

works of Christian apologetics, Butler*s Analogy of Religion, Was based on the validity of analogical reasoning. says Southey, found

Butler,

♦ • in outward and visible things

type and evidence of those within the veil.*41

the

John Henry

Hewman, though conceding that analogy needs to he buttressed by other argumentation, states: There is a certain sense in which analogy may be said to supply a positive argument. • • • The coincidence of two witnesses independently giving the same account of a transaction is an argument for its truth: the likeness of two effects argues one cause for both.4R Many modern logicians have affirmed anew the necessity of analogical reasoning to all induction.

John Maynard Keynes

goes so far as to say, "Scientific method, indeed, is-mainly devoted to discovering means of so heightening the known anal­ ogy that we may dispense as far as possible with the methods of pure induction."43

The scientific method is based on anal^

ogy within nature; Edwards merely went a step further to posit 4:0 Ibid., p . 49. £1 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, natural and Revealed (Hew York, E. P.TSutton and Sompanyi 1906), p. xvTTT 4& J. H. Hewman, The grammar of Assent London, Longman, Green and Company, 151V), p.

(HewYork 498.

and

43 Quoted in B, E. Trueblood, The Logic of Belief (Hew York, Haper and Brothers, 194B), pp. 47-4$.

42 an anological relationship between nature and supernature, as in the following: There is a wonderfull analogy between what is seen in rivers, their gathering from innumerable small branches beginning at a great distance one from another in differ­ ent regions, some one the sides or tops of mountains, othera in valleys, and all conspiring to one common issue, all after those very diverse and contrary courses which they held for a while, yet all gathering more and more together the nearer they come to their common end and ul­ timate issue, and all at length discharging themselves at one mouth into the same ocean* Here is lively represented how all things tend to one, even to God, the boundless ocean, which they can add nothing to, as mightiest rivers that continually discharge themselves into tie ocean add nothing to it sensibly*44 Thus for Bdwards there exists a universal correspondence

be­

tween all the segments of reality* 2*

Centrality

Another basic implication of the concept of proportion is that all areas of reality and experience are related by great centrality*

Ke is sure, for example, that God is

tral in the physical universe*

a

cen­

In a closing sermonic appeal

Mdwards asks: What art thou in the hands of the great God, who made heaven and earth by speaking a word? What art thou, when dealt with by that strength, which manages all this vast universe, holds the globe of the earth, directs all the motions of the heavenly bodies from age to age, and. when the fixed time shall come, will shake it t o pieces?***

*4 Miller, Images and Shadows, p. 7b. Works, I?, 263 {^Punishment of the Wicked*).

43 Biwards is equally sure that Sod is at the center of the mor­ al or providential universe. fhe 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 shew 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 pen 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*4^ Of special interest is the application of this princi­ ple to Christ*

In the same sermon Bdwards twice says

Christ is a center*

that

In the first instance, Christ is the

meeting-place of opposites* There is an admirable conjunction of diverse excellen­ cies in Christ* The lion and the lamb, though very di­ verse kinds of creatures, yet have their peculiar excel­ lencies* The lion excels in strength, and in the majesty of his voice; the lamb excels in meekness and patience besides the excellent nature of the creature as good for food, and yielding that which is fit for our clothing, and being suitable to be offered in sacrifice to God. But we see that Ohrist in the text Qtev* 5:5z& is compared to both; because the diverse excellencies of both won­ derfully meet In him*v” Edwards precedes to specify seven pairs of opposites

which

meet in Ghrist* 1 * Infinite glory and lowest humility Zm Infinite majesty and transcendent meekness 3* Deepest reverence toward God and equality with God 4* Infinite worthiness of good, and greatest patience un­ der sufferings of evil I F E n i e r , Images and Shadows, p* 1S3 (Image #178, which is a quotation from Spencer *s Simllles and Sentences)* Works, I¥, 180

("The Excellency of Ghrist*}*

44 3, Exceeding spirit of obedience, end supreme dominion over heaven and earth 6. Absolute sovereignty and perfect resignation 7# Self-sufficiency and an entire trust and reliance on God^® He then closes the sermon by referring to Christ as the meeting-place of reasons for menfs belief in Him as the Saviour# let the consideration of this wonderful meeting of di­ verse excellencies in Christ induce you to accept him, and ©lose with him as your Saviour# As all manner of excel­ lencies meet in him, so there are concurring in him all manner of arguments and motives, to move you to choose him for your Saviour# • • • His fulness and all-sufficien­ cy as a Saviour gloriously appear in that variety of ex­ cellencies that has been spofcen of#” there is, then, a universal center or centrality bring together all the diverse aspects of reality#

to

this cen­

trality, for Edwards, is God# 3# Balance A third implication of proportion for Edwards is bal­ ance#

this is closely related to the principle of centrality;

and some of the examples of the former also illustrate latter#

the

But whereas the emphasis of the latter is the drawing

together of the opposites, the former's emphasis is the basic equality of the opposites#®$Edwards* God was not one who could IT, IV, 180-185 {nThe Excellency of Christ*># Ibid## IV, 193 (*fhe Excellency of Ghrist*)# Bushin draws a similar contrast between symmetry and proportion# the former is the opposition of equals; the latter the connection of unequals• Thus the equal boughs on opposite sides of a tree are an example of symmetry; the shorter and smaller toward the top, of proportion* See Modern Painters, II, 71-73. --------- -

45 tolerate lopsidedness in reality. Edwards saw a balance between the functions of the Persons of the Trinity.

Each Person has a proper work;

and

no

one of them overshadows or encroaches upon the other two. In this work of salvation every distinct person of the trinity has his distinct offices and parts assigned him. Each one has his particular and distinct, personal properties, relations, and economical offices# • . . The Father appoints and provides the Redeemer, and accepts the price. He redeems us by offering up himself, the Ho­ ly Ghost immediately communicates to us the thing pur­ chased; yea, and he is the good purchased.®* there is balance in Sod’s nature, not only between the

three

Persons, but also between the divine attributes. It is agreeable to God’s design in the creation of the universe to exercise every attribute, and thus to manifest the glory of each of them. God’s design in the creation was to glorify himself, or to make a discovery of the es­ sential glory of his nature. . « » it was his design to make a true manifestation of his glory, such as should represent every attribute. If God glorified one attri­ bute, and not another, such manifestation of his glory would be defective; and the representation would not be complete. If all God’s attributes are not manifested, the glory of none of them is manifested as it is: for the di­ vine attributes reflect glory on one another,®** Edwards’ view of the Atonement also suggests the prin­ ciple of balance.

For him, the Atonement was the balancing

of the scales of divine justice# There is a Saviour provided, who is able, and who freely offers to save you from that punishment and that 61 Works, IV, 141 ("Wisdom Pi splayed in Salvation” ). 52 Ibid., IV, 556 ("God’s Sovereignty’’). 53 Ibid., IV, S79 ("Eternity of Hell Torments’?)*

in a way which is perfectly consistent with the glory of God, yea* which Is more to the glory of God than it would he if you should suffer the eternal punishment of hell. For if you should suffer that punishment you would never pay the whole of the deht. Those who are sent to hell never will have paid the whole of the debt which they owe to God, nor indeed a part which bears any proportion to the whole. They never will have paid a part which bears so great a proportion to the whole, as one mite to ten thousand talents, Justice therefore never can be actually satisfied in your damnation; but it is actually satis­ fied in 0hrist,5? ©ivine Justice also shows Itself in the eventual open rewarding of the righteous. One part of the reward which God intends for his saints* is the honor which he intends to bestow upon them. He will honor them in the most public and open manner, before the angels* before all mankind and before them that hated them, And it is most suitable that it should be so; it is suitable that those holy, humble souls* that have been hatid by wicked men, have been cruelly treated and put to shame by them, and who have been haughtily domineered over* should be openly acquited,com­ mended a**d crowned, before all the world*®1! This reminds one of Kantfs moral argument for immortality. Actually, such an emphasis was new to neither Kant nor wards;

it had been part of the common theological

for centuries, though Kant was the first to develop

heritage it

so

In a passage on heaven Edwards suggests that the elect will fill the vacancy caused by the fall of angels. It (SalvatiogJ is for the benefit of angels, as here­ by the elect of mankind are gathered intoDhelr society.

6& ibid,", IF, 2F9 (^Eternity of Hell Torments*), 54 Ibid., IV, SOT ("The Final Judgment").

Christ, by the work of redemption, gathers in the elect of mankind to Join the angels of heaven* » , • The heaven*ly soeiety ismade more complete by this accession of the saints to it* . » • The angels rejoice that others are added to join them and assist them in praising God* And thus the vacancy by the fall of angels is filled up*bP Thus the cosmic equilibrium will be reestablished:

heaven

will once more be complete when the whole number of the elect will be gathered in*

W*

At this point, as at many others,

wards leans heavily upon his Augustinian-Calvinistic heritage* According t o Calvinism, God saves only as many as He can the consent of His whole nature to save*

But Edwards carries

it a step further: because a limited atonement is in ture of God it

get

the na­

isalso in the nature of the universe* By such

a scheme universal balance is achieved* The supposed geometric basis of Edwards* thought been delineated verbally*

has

But adequately to expound the the­

sis of this paper the concept must be represented pictorially and spatially* early works;

Edwards himself used this technique

in

it will therefore not violate the spirit

his and

method of Edwards so to represent his thought* 1* A world without correspondence probably impressed the sub-threshold levels of his consciousness as follows:

56 Ibid*:, IV, 148

(”Wisdom displayed in Salvation*)

€8 But a world of correspondence or analogy would be represented thus:

2 * A world without centrality might be pictorialized as:

But true centrality corrects the former to:

3* A cosmos without balance probably evoked a picture such ass

The true universe, however, is one of equilibrium or balance*

49

Is it to go beyond the evidence, then, to suggest that Edwards was dominated by a single idea? As an eighteenth century theologian, he was great in the scope and symmetry of his design. He saw the plan of redemption as a vast drama, stretching back to the fall of the angels and forward to the promise of Just men made perfect In infinite ages beyond the last trump, nothing was single; nothing was final; every end was merely a new beginning* His mind could not rest until he had brought the whole system within his ken, and unified it by a single idea.5^ That single idea, it is the thesis of this paper, was eonsent or proportion#

Bren God Himself is caught in it; just

Whitehead’s God is caught in the process of creativity, Edwards ’ God is bound by the law of proportion*

It is

thinkable that Sod should act out of proportion to for to do so would be to act against His nature.

as so un­

reality,

And

His

nature Is proportion.^? 56 Winslow, op. pit*, p* 307* 57 ’*• * « to find out the reasons of things, in nat­ ural Philosophy, is only to find out the proportion of God’s acting.n From ’’Sotes on the Mind,1* in Faust and Johnson, op* cit*, p* 09.

CHAPTER III PROPORTION AS THE BASIS OF BEAUTY Among the moat interesting of ell the Edwards' manu­ scripts is his "Notes on the Kind,” which was written toy Ed­ wards during his college years, 1716-1720.

The Notes were

written on nine sheets of foolscap, transcripts of which are deposited in Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre, Massachusetts,

They are arranged unaer such headings as

Space, Substance, Matter, Thought, Motion, Union, Seeing, Perception, Memory, Reason, Power, Judgment, Ideas, Love, I Appetite, Truth and Certainty* The publication in 1830 of the Notes together with his "Notes on Science,1' written during the same period, "• • , made his reputation as a philosopher

2 and won him a place in the textbooks,"

The general interest

in the "Notes on the Mind" arises from the philosophical idealism therein expressed. this concepts

There are at least two facets to

One is the influence of Locke, whom Edwards

read greedily while in college, getting, he wrote, more pleas­ ure from it ", . , than the most greedy miser finds, when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold, from some newly dis3 covered treasure." Locke led Edwards to a recognition of

X C. H. Faust and T. H. Johnson* Eepresentative Sei op­ tions from Jonathan Edwards (New York and Cincinnati, Ameri­ can Book Company, 1935), pp. 417-418. 8 Perry Miller, Jonathan E&wftrda (New York, William Sloan Associates, 1949), p. 59. 3 Quoted from Bwight in Eaust and Rohnson, op.cit., p. xxv.

51 the importance of sensation to the understanding, having de­ clared in An 35ssay Concerning Human Understanding that even 4 the most abstruse ideas had their origin in the senses, The interest of modern criticism in the Hot'as, says Miller, lies in Edwards* "brilliant stroke of extending to primary qualities 5 the critique which Locke had applied to the secondary." Locke had assigned to objective reality such "primary" qualities as solidity, bulk, extention, number, figure, and mobility, thou^i "secondary" qualities such as color, sound, or taste exist only in the sense of the spectators.

But ^dwards followed

Locke's logic through to the end by endeavoring to show that Locke*s solidity, number, and figure (which Edwards reduced to the single term "resistance"), being as much a concept as color, were as much mental,

"And how is there any Resistance, 6 except it be in some mind, in idea?" The second facet of special interest in Edwards* idealism is its source.

"Was it the product of precocious genius, or an

adaptation of the Berkeleian system, or a blending of the ideal7 istic hints and suggestions then in the air?" Serious attempts have been made to establish the second of these alternatives, IW

I I . . . II

.1

I . ,

m m

4 Bk, II, ch. xii, see. 8, 5 Miller, op. cit., p. 60. 6

P* 61.

7 Woddbridge Riley, American Philosophy the Early Schools, p. 189 (quoted in Faust a n d J o h n s o n , " o p eit.y p. xxviij.

“but they cannot he said to have succeeded* Actually there is no evidence whatsoever that Edwards read Berkeley, then or later; his journals meticulously acknowledge his dehts to every philosopher he managed to read, and nowhere is there any sign of a first-hand acquaintance with Berkeley. Belief in the Berkeleyan influence springs from a reluctance to credit a mere hoy with achieving such maturity— a strange inference for the century of Mozart— or else upon a superficial read­ ing of the parallel.8 This idealism, though fervently presented in Botes on the Mind, was not formally defended in Edwards1 later works. Does this mean that he abandoned the view?

Probably not*

There is no reason for thinking that he abandoned it; in­ deed, it is implicit in much of what he wrote* But his early intention to force it upon the attention of the world was given up. Perhaps he felt it unnecessary to complicate the various controversies in which he was en­ gaged by insistence upon it. Furthermore, he had even in the beginning felt that it was of no practical importance, for in TBotes on Mind1 he wrote.that even if one accepted the notion that the material universe existed only mentally, one might still *speak in the old way, and as properly and truly as ever.”9 Having laid in the early part of the Botes

the founda­

tion of general idealistic theory, Edwards precedes in the maior portion of the work to discuss the activity of the mind in the perception of beauty*

Beauty is not in an^L object; it is

/

rather the effect upon the mind of the perception of proportion and relationship. Edwards’ concept of beauty as the mind’s per-

8 Miller, op. eft., pp. 61-62. ^ Faust and Johnson, op. eft., p. xxviii.

5^

ception of proportion will now be discussed in some detail* After the presentation of his idealistic theory, Ed­ wards procedes to define Excellency*

This is necessary, for

though we are more concerned with it than with any other thing ("yea, we are concerned with nothing else"), there has been no concept so lacking definition. lency?

What, thefa, is Excel­

Some have said that all excellency is harmony, sym­

metry, or proportion.

But this is too simple, for proportion

itself needs explanation.

What is the basis of proportion?

Equality, answers Edwards; "it is the Equality, that makes the Proportion." more exactly:

It is now possible to define Excellency

it consists in that which is the basis of pro­

portion— -that is, in equality. 10 Thus, if there be two perfect equal circles, or globes, together, there is something more of beauty than if they Were unequal, disproportionate magnitudes. And if two araliel lines be drawn, the beauty is greater, than if hey were obliquely inclined without proportion, because there is equality of distance.-1'1 12 This can be illustrated. If two circles are placed between

f

two parallel lines, each at the same distance from each of the lines, "the beauty is greater, than if they stood at irregular

10 The italicized words in this quoted paragraph are all italicized in the original. 11 All quotations in this section are from flotes on the Mind, unless otherwise indicated. ^ All the drawn illustrations in this section are in the original.

54 distances from the parallel lines*” 1 o

o

Likewise, the two circles in Figure 2 rrshould each stand at an equal distance from the perpendicular line next to them; otherwise there is no beauty.” 2 o

o

If three circles are placed between two parallel lines and near a perpendicular line (Figure 3), ”the most beautiful form per­ haps, that they could he placed in, is in an equilateral tri­ angle with the cross [perpendicular] line, because there are most equalities.”

If a similar arrangement of three circles is made on the opposite side of the rectangle, . . . the beauty is still greater, where the distances from the lines, in the one, are equa11to the distances in the other; also the two next to the cross lines are at equal distances from the other two; or, if you go crosswise, from corner to corner. The two cross lines are also parallel, so that all parts are at an equal distance, and innumerable other equalities might be found. The simple equality decribed above, without proportion,

"is the lowest kind of Regularity, and may he called Simple Beauty."

{Proportion, in contrast, being a departure from,

or refinement of, simple equality, is "Complex Beauty."

If

points A and B are placed two inches apart, and another point, C, one inch farther,

# . it is requisite, in order to

regularity and beauty, if there be another, D, that it should be at half an inch distance; otherwise there is no regularity, and the last, D, would stand out of its proper place." •

»

•

A

&

c

•

J>

A, B, G,

Or, to take an illustration f^more complex still,”

and D, in the following example, are out of proportion in either single line. A (

‘ I‘

B e I ' I

J *| . |

1I 1

~P I ’ I

| . | . | ' | ■ | ,

A

C

rI

■ r

' ■ I

•

I 35

But the two different scales, when compared, bring beauty of a sort:

%

. • although A, B, C, 2), are not proportioned,

but are confusion among themselves; yet taken with the whole they are proportioned and beautiful." After these geometrical illustrations of beauty as equal­ ity and proportion, Edwards introduces his now famous concept of Being’s consent to -^eing.

When there are two different^shaped

bodies which have no similarity of relation between the parts

56 of the extremities, ♦ . * this, considered by itself, is a deformity, because being disagrees with being, which must undoubtedly be di sagreeable to perceiving beings because what disagrees with Being, must necessarily be disagreeable to Being in gen­ eral, to every thing that partakes of entity, and of course to perceiving being; and what agrees with Being, must be agreeable to Being in general, and therefore to perceiving being* Beings can agree with one another only in Relation, otherwise their duality would.be destroyed, and they would become a unity#

And the concept of Relation, together with its quasi­

synonyms such as Correspondency, Symmetry, and Regularity, is in the final analysis Equality*

Though equality is itself

simple, it takes many complex forms in the world.

At least

three can be distinguished: 1* natural beauty* That sort of beauty which is called natural, as of vines, plants, trees, etc. consists of a very compli­ cated harmony; and all the natural motions, and tenden­ cies, and figures of bodies in the Universe are done according to proportion, and therein is their beauty* 13 2* The arts * Thus in Music, not only in the proportion which the several notes of a tune bear, one among another, but in merely two notes, there is harmony; whereas it is impos­ sible there should be proportion between only two terms* But the proportion is in- the particular vibrations of the air, which strike on the ear. And so, in the pleasant­ ness of light, colours, tastes, smells and touch, all arise from proportion of motion.

This title is interpretive; Edwards did not use it.

37 3. Spiritual beauty* Spiritual harmonies are of vastly larger extent: i.e. the proportions are vastly oftener redoubled, and respect mere beings, and require a vastly larger view to comprehend them; as some simple notes do more affect one, who has not a comprehensive understanding of Music. In view of all this* Edwards proposes a ". . * universal definition of Excellency: - -The Consent of Being to Being, or B e i n g C o n s e n t to Entity.

The more the Consent is, and the

more extensive, the greater is the Excellency.19 It is possible to express Edwards1 argument in a formal, syllogistic manner, though he did not so present it in the original. Major premise: Excellency is Equality. Proportion is a thing that may be explained yet fui&her. It is an Equality, or likeness of Ratios; so that it is the Equa 1 ity,' "that makes the Proportion. Excellency therefore seems to consist in Equality. Minor premise: Equality is that which is according to Being. The reason, Why Equality thus pleases the mind, and In­ equality is unpleasing, is because Disproportion, or Inconsistency, is contrary to Being. . . . When one being is inconsistent with another being, then Being is contradicted. But contradiction to Being, is intoler­ able to perceiving being, and the consent to Being, most pleasing. Conclusion:

♦ ♦ Excellency is that which is according to

Being (that which is the consent of Being to Being). This is an universal definition of Excellency:---The Consent of Being to Being, or Beingfs Consent to Ent ity.

^ T h e italics are in the original

The more the Consent is, and the more extensive, the greater is the Excellency, x Such a syllogism, while interpretative * is true to the pasie movement of thought in the Notes on the Mind, In Chapter I, the importance of beauty to Edwards1 thought was shown, although cursorily, because of the introductory nature ef the chapter.. Chapter II has shown the importance of proportion and its many synonyms to his philosophy and the­ ology.

This chapter, III, has endeavored to demonstrate that

the Beauty of Chapter I and the Proportion of Chapter II are in reality the same; that for Edwards the beautiful is the pro­ portionate and the proportionate is the beautiful#

This con­

clusion, if true, has important implications for the study of Edwards; it provides one with a clue to the whole Edwardian thought-structure; and it provides an important insight into the man himself.

"What manner of man is this?" is the (question

of many modern students of Sdwardsiana who find unexpected and unimagined vistas of thought and imagination in this solitary figure of the Connecticut valley.

CHAPTER IV VIRTUE AS BEAUTY

‘

Though Edwards1 teaching on beauty is implicit in all of his works, it is explicit in his treatise, The Nature of True Virtue# Written at Stockbridge in 1755, the treatise is the voice of the mature Edwards, who, having thought and written much about beauty in a non-systematic way, here or­ ganizes and systematizes his aesthetic ideas*

The following

several pages will be devoted to a careful condensation of Books I and III of this treatise, these being the sections specifically devoted to the analysis of beauty. Chapter I* "Showing wherein the Essence of true Virtue consists When men speak about virtue, all except the most skep­ tical mean something beautiful; they have reference to some kind of beauty, or excellency*

In saying this men do not mean that

all beauty is virtue, for the beauty of a building, a flower, or a rainbow can hardly be said to be virtuous.

Rather do they

have reference to that kind of beauty belonging to Beings that have perception and will. But again we must qualify:

not all

the beauty of willing and perceiving beings is virtuous, since there is no virtue in the external beauty of the face, in a fair shape, in gracefulness of motion or in harmony of voice. No, it is the mind of man that is beautiful. time we must qualify:

^

But still another

not all the beauty of minds is virtuous;

speculation ana understanding have nothing to do with vir­ tue and goodness, whereas "• • * virtue is the beauty of those qualities and acts of the mind that are of a moral 1 — nature•" This kind of beauty belongs to disposition and will,

that is to say, to the heart*

to formulate a definition of virtue:

We are now prepared "Virtue is the beauty

of the qualities and exercises of the heart, or those ac2 tions which precede from them*" Virtue is beauty; but what is beauty?

We can begin the

analysis by distinguishing between two types o£ beauty: par­ ticular and general.

Particular beauty is beauty connected

with a limite# private sphere, as the beauty of a specific object*

General beauty, on the other hand, is beauty in its

total relatedness*

Particular beauty may exist without gen­

eral beauty, as a few musical notes in a tune, harmonious when played sequentially, may be unharmonious when considered in relation to the whole tune*

General beauty is the higher.

form; it includes all other beauty within itself* The distinction of the preceding paragraph assists one in a further definition of virtue.

Hot only is virtue that

which belongs to the heart of an intelligent being; it is also beautiful by a general beauty; it is concerned with total relatedness.

Thus we can say that "true virtue most essentially 2 consists in benevolence to Being in general;" or that "it is 1 Workg, II, p. 261. 2 I M a >, II, p. 262.

61 that consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in gen-

d eral, that is immediately exercised in a general good will,” Benevolence to Being in general will lead to Benevolence to particular Beings, which will he virtuous because it is part of the total benevolence.

But no love for particular Beings

is virtuous except that which comes from the disposition to 4 love Being in general. In other words, the process is deduc­ tive, not inductive;

we go from the general to the particular,

not vice versa. At this point it is necessary to distinguish between two kinds of love,

love of benevolence means the love af a

being for the sake of its well-being, not necessarily for its beauty.

Love of complacence, however, is the opposite; it is

"complacence in the Being loved for its beauty."

This kind

of love is not virtuous, for it involves one in a circular argument which would make the beauty of intelligent beings (virtue) consist in love to beauty (love of complacence); or that would make virtue primarily consist in love to virtue. If virtue virtue, the virtue must And if it be consists in

3

consists primarily in love thing loved, is the love of consist in the love of the inquired, what that virtue the love of the love of, it

to virtue, then virtue: so that love of virtue. Is, which virtue must be answered,

. II, P. 262.

^ This emphasis on. love to Being in general is similar to Kant*s ethics, according to which nothing is good but a good will.

62 it ia the love of virtue# So that there must he the love of the love of the love of virtue, and so on in infiniturn.§ Neither is gratitude

that in which virtue primarily consists,

for the term implies a benevolence prior to gratitude, and, if logically pursued* a first benevolence which has no bene­ volence prior to it.

We are led, therefore, to the conclus­

ion ". . • that the primary object of virtuous love is Being, 6 simply c o n s i d e r e d V i r t u e consists primarily in an "abso7 lute benevolence" to Being in general. That virtue consists primarily in benevolence to Being in general does not mean, however, that there is virtue in only this kind of benevolence.

Being in general, it is true, is

the first object of a virtuous benevolence, but is not the only object.

Virtuous benevolence will also seek the good of every

individual Being ^unless it be conceived as not consistent with 8 the highest good of Being in general." Any particular Being 9 who willfully opposes Being in general must himself be opposed.

6 Works, II, pp. 263-864. 6

II, p. 264.

7 This reminds one of Schweitzer's principle of "reverence for life," except that Idwards restricts his meaning to Intelligent being. 8 Ibid.. II, p. 264. ® Modern penology has based itself on a similar concept. Every man deserves freedom* but when that freedom opposes Being in general (society, in this case) it must be surrendered.

If being in general, or Being simply considered, be the first object of a virtuous benevolence, it follows that the "Being who has most of Being, or has the greatest share of existence, other things being ei • More important, though, is the question whether he should be called a hedonist from the standpoint of the philosophy and psychology of aesthetics. 17

Are we justified

Works, II, p. 265 ("The Nature of True Virtue” ).

Donald H. Rhoades, J onathan Edwards: Experimental Theologian (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale tJniversity, 1946), p. 197.

to link, even by linguistic association, the name of Edwards with that of Epicurus? There can be little doubt that there is a general he­ donistic or eudaemonistic emphasis in Edwards*

The following

are two among many possible quotations that support this statement* The riches of the Christian are immense; all things are included in his treasure* Pleasures unspeakably and incon­ ceivably great await him; rivers of delight* fulness of joy; and all of infinite duration*19 Christ has also purchased pleasure for them ijjhe saints] , pleasures that are immensely preferable to all the pleasures of sense, most exquisitely sweet, and satisfying. He has purchased for them fulness of joy, and pleasures for ever­ more at Cod’s right hand; and they shall drink of the river of God’s pleasure*20 The pleasure which the saints enjoy has many different aspects*

Some of these follow* Pleasure in divine things:

True saints have their minds * * * inexpressible pleased and delighted with the sweet idea of the glorious and ami­ able nature of the things of God* And this is the spring of all their delights, and the cream of all their pleasures: it is the joy of their joy* This sweet and ravishing enter­ tainment they have in the view of the delightful and beau­ tiful nature of divine things, is the foundation of the joy they have afterward*21 This lyeading the Blbl0 is a pleasant way of improving time* Knowledge is pleasant and delightful to intelligent creatures, and above all the knowledge of divine things;

^

Works, IV, p* 146 ("Wisdom Displayed in Salvation").

20 Ibid*, IV, p. 144 ("Wisdom Displayed in Salvation")* ibid., Ill, p. 98 ("Religious Affections")*

83 for in them are the most excellent truths, and the most beautiful and amiable objects held forth to view. How­ ever tedious the labor necessarily attending this busi­ ness may be, yet the knowledge, once obtained will richly requite the pains taken to obtain it* "When wisdom en­ ter© th the heart, knowledge is pleasant to the soul." Prov. iv. 13.28 2. Pleasure in knowing Christ; • * * if we choose Christ for our friend and protion, we shall be hereafter so received to him, that there shall be nothing to hinder the fullest enjoyment of him, to the satisfying the utmost cravings of our souls. We may take our full swing at gratifying our spiritual appetite after these holy pleasures. Christ will then say, as in Cant* v* 1, "Eat, 0 friends, drink, yea, drink abundsrtly, 0 b e ­ loved." And this shall be our entertainment to all eter­ nity I There shall never be any end of this happiness, or anything to Interrupt our enjoyment of it, or in the least to molest us in iti&3

sweetness of Christ1© peace; This peace [that Christ gives] greatly differs from that which is enjoyed by the men of the world, with re­ gard to its exquisite sweetness. . . . It is exquisitely sweet, because it has so firm a foundation as the ever­ lasting rock that never can be moved. It is sweet* be­ cause perfectly agreeable to reason. It is sweet, be­ cause it rises from holy and divine principles. . . . It is exquisitely sweet, because of the greatness of the ob­ jective good that the saints enjoy. . • • It is sweet, on account of the fulness and perfection of that provision that is made for it in Christ and the new eovenant.24 4. The pleasure of heaven as a contrast to hell: The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever. . . . It will make their own happi­ ness the greater, as it will make them more sensible of

^ Ibid., IV, p. 13 {"Importance and Advantages of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth"). 23 Ibid.. IV, p. SOQ ("Excellency of Christ"). 24 Ibid.. IV, p. 436 ("Peaee Which Christ Gives").

84 their own happiness; it will give them a more lively relish of it; it will make them prize it more. When they see others, who were of the same nature, and horn under the same circumstances, plunged into suoh misery, and they so distinguished, 0 it will make them sensible how happy they are. A sense of the opposite misery, in all oases..greatly increases the relish of any joy or pleasure.25 5. Eternal pleasure; The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will forever entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their everlasting feast. The re­ deemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy the angels, and will enjoy one another; but that which they shall enjoy in the angels or in each other, or in any thing else whatsoever that will yield themselves delight and happiness, will be what will be seen of God in them.25 Many pages might be filled with similar quotations, but the above will suffice to show that there is in Edwards a marked hedonistic or eudaemonistie element.

Had Edwards been a ma­

terialist instead of an idealist, his refined hedonism might well have been the grossest sort of Epicureanism. In this hedonistic emphasis Edwards resembles two modern hedonistic aestheticians, H, R. Marshall and George Santayana. The latter1s view is especially interesting; in essence, it is that pleasure is transformed into beauty whenever the value is unconsciously imputed to the object contemplated, and not to 87 the body or mind of the person contemplating. Thus Edwards and

25 Ibid., IV, p* 876 ("Eternity of Hell Torments"). Ifrlfl* * IV, p. 174 ("God Glorified in Man’s Dependence"), 27 Summarized from Melvin M. Rader, A Modern Book of Esthetics (Hew York, Henry Holt and Company, 1§35), chapter on Hedonism.

86 Santayana approach the beauty-pleasure relationship from opposite points of view:

the former deals with the trans­

formation of beauty into pleasure; the latter with the trans­ formation of pleasure to beauty. Granted that Edwards has many elements in common with the more strictly aesthetic thinkers, one still asks which one of them predominates•

It is the opinion of this paper 28 that the last-named, the hedonistic, predominates. Though Edwards can be partially fitted into several differest aes­ thetic systems, he best fits within the framework of hedonism, though it is hedonism of a spiritual nature--ahedonism which 29 includes but also transcends sense experience#

Perhaps eudaemonistic, rather than hedonistic, would better describe Edwards* aesthetic system,r since the former word, at least by etymology (good guardian spirit), is associated more with soul-pleasures; while the latter word is often associated with sensuous, or even sensual, pleasures. Certainly the modern word utilitarian would not describe Ed­ wards* system, since he evidences little concern for the masses. "Hedonism** is used, however, because Rader so classifies Marshall and Santayana. 29 i»rp0 SUpe, he [jidwardsJ tells us again and again that sensuous beauties are but outward expressions of ^mental” beauties, but the second are as aesthetic as the first.” Rhoades, o£. cit#, p. 197.

AESTHETIC IEFUJEHCES OH EDWARDS Edwards1 aesthetic views did not develop in a vacuum* He was influenced by two factors, external (or physical)* and internal (or intellectual). to the external factor:

Allusion has been made earlier

childhood life in the frontier-like

Connecticut Valley, with all the proximity to nature that one would expect in such a situation.

But what of the intellec­

tual influences on his view of the nature and function of the aesthetic? Several thinkers helped shape Edwards1 aesthetic con­ cepts,

One was Hewton, whose view of a law-bound universe

probably contributed to Edwards1 stress on order and harmony as essential to beauty.

Another was Ioeke.from whose empha­

sis on perception Edwards learned that ”, . . to define the good and the beautiful he must analyze the contents of the 1 perception, discover its structure, its anatomy.n Another was the Cambridge Platonists, especially Cudworth, whose in­ tuitional emphasis and teaching on the nature of the true experience of Cod and the Good probably reinforced the exper-

Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Hew York, William Sloan Associates, 1949 )9 p. 2^9 •

2 iential side of Edwards*

Still another was Shaftesbury, 3 whose effort to establish virtue as a kind of beauty in­ fluenced Edwards' most definitive treatise on beauty, The Bature of True Virtue * The most important of the intellectual influences on Edwards' aesthetics, however, was Francis Hutcheson*

Of all

the intuitionist writers who influenced his aesthetics, says Hhoades, he found *. . . most in common with Hutcheson, es4 pecially in his emphasis on 'Benevolence*'. . *n And Faust and Johnson speak of Hutcheson as one *• • . t o whom Edwards often refers and who plainly influenced him profoundly* • Hutcheson must be understood against the background of English philosophy*

Hobbes had taught that the ruling motive

in human eonduet was self-interest,

Hutcheson, and Shaftes-

2 Rhoades tends to minimize the influence of the Cam­ bridge Platonists on Edwards: "He can be understood* except for a few phrases, quite well without them*" Donald H. Rhoades, Jonathan Edwards: Experimental Theologian (unpub­ lished doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 1946), p* xlviii* But Townsend disagrees: "He was more directly in­ debted to them [the Cambridge Platonlst^J than to any other school of philosophy." H, C* Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States (Hew York and Cincinnati, American SooFlTompany , T9S1T7 P* 44* 3 c. H* Faust and T. H. Johnson, Representative Selec­ tions from Jonathan Edwards (Hew York and Cincinnati “ American Book Company, 1£3'5F,’p* lxxx (summary of Shaftesbury's influ­ ence }* 4 Rhoades, 0 ]>. cit*, p. 95. 5 Faust and Johnson, op* cit*, p* Ixxviil.

bury before him, opposed Hobbes with the opposite principle 6 of altruism. Basie to his thought was the concept of a moral sense in man by which men perceive the excellence of a virtu­ ous act even when the act offers no advantage to them* involved two steps.

This

First he endeavored to establish that

men have an internal sense by which they derive pleasure in the perception and contemplation of forms having order and regularity.

Second, if this is true (as he thought it was),

it is an easy step to another, superior sense, a moral sense, consisting in a determination to be pleased in the presence of moral beauty— the beauty not of inanimate things harmoni­ ously arranged, but of actions, characters, affections in which regularity and order are observable.

Thus Hutcheson

in essence said that virtue is to be followed not because it is useful, but because it is beautiful.

The proximity of

this to Edwards1 teaching in The Nature of True Virtue is immediately apparent* While Edwards was influenced positively by Hutcheson at some points, he can scarcely be regarded as a disciple, since he differed from Hutcheson and his group ” ♦ • . a t points so important that he can scarcely be regarded as a 7 follower of the group.” The two men were alike in their

— A. G. McGiffert, Jonathan Edwards (New York and Lon­ don, Harper and Brothers, 1932), p. 196. ? Faust and Johnson, op . cit., p. Ixxxi, footnote.

89 common acceptance of the theory that the amiableness of vir8 tue lay in its beauty rather than in its benefits9 and in 9 their common belief that beauty is intuitively apprehended* But they differed markedly on the state of "natural* man* Edwards, stern Calvinist that he was at times, did not agree that man possessed a natural impulse toward virtue.

"In his

insistence on the universal selfishness of natural man, he was closer to Hobbes and Mandeville."

8 Ibid., p* lxxxi. 9 Rhoades, op* cit., p. 95* 10 I»oc. cit.

CHAPTER VIII THE BEAUTY OF EDWARDS1 STYLE One would expect that a man who thought as much about beauty as Edwards did would give evidence of the fact, not only in the content, but also in the form, of his writings. If beauty is as basic to the thought of Edwards as this pa­ per attempts to prove, one would expect it to overflow the bounds of thought alone and spill into other areas of his total personality. in Edwards*

This expectation is partially realized

His later, polemical works— including the theolog­

ical treatises— are well reasoned, but not so well written; perhaps with some reason Thomas Huxley called the treatises 1 "lumbering and awkward." But the earlier works, primarily the sermons, reveal a preoccupation with beauty of both thought and expression*

Winslow says:

"As a young preacher

he chose more texts from Revelation, Psalms, Proverbs, Solo­ m o n ^ Song than in later years, and he also developed his thought more poetically."

The study of Edwards* early ser­

mons is almost as much a study in style as in thought. Edwards early recorded his theory of style in a series i

^ C* H. Faust and T. H. Johnson, Representative Selec­ tions from Jonathan Edwards (Hew York and Cincinnati, American Book" Company", 133&T, p. cxiv.

of twenty rules which he wrote for himself on the cover to his ^Hotes on natural Science♦** in a modest, unaffected style.

They show his early interest Following are the most per­

tinent: 2. To give but few prefatorial admonitions about the style and method* It doth an author much hurt to show his concern in those things* * * 4* Let much modesty be seen in the style. . . 6. The world will expect more modesty lD>ecause] of my circumstances in America young etc; • • Yet the models ought not to be affected and foolish but decent and natural. • •

9. To be very moderate in the use of terms of art. Let it not look as if I was much read, or was conversant with books, or with the learned world. . • 12. In writing, let there be much compliance with the reader’s weakness, and according to the rules in the Ladies Library Yol.l, p. 340, and sequel. . 17. Before I venture to publish in London to make some experiment in my own country to play at small games first. That I may some experience in writing first to write letters to some in England and to try my (Rand ii£J lesser matters before I venture in great Edwards was concerned for an unrhetorical, modest, unadorned style.

In this concern he was but following the prevailing

theories of literary art which were expressed in both America 5 and l&igland.

® rules.

Ladies Library contained commonplace grammatical ~ p—

4 In Faust and Johnson, o]>* cit.. pp. ci-eii. ^ Edwards had access to, and read, such literary maga­ zines as The Guardian. The Tatler. and The Spectator.

92 fhough influenced generally by the literary world around him, Edwards was much more influenced in his literary style by the majestic phrases of the King James version of the Bible; this was ft. . • by far the most Important model on which he framed his own Fstyle^, consciously and uneon6 seiously,1* Edwards chose his texts from every book of the Bible, but more often from the poetical sections.

At times

his very phrasing and choice of words show heavy dependence upon the Psalms, Proverbs, and Johannine writings, especially the Apocalypse*

^Edwards was steeped in scriptural litera­

ture; all else was ancillary to it, and his sermon imagery and rhetoric show a heavy, direct, and almost exclusive debt 7

to it.n

In this respect Edwards was somewhat like Bunyan,

whose literary style was due almost solely to his close acquaintance with the Elizabethan style Of the King James Bible. Edwards1 style is marked by several interesting features, which are as follows; 1'* Imagery# Edwards had special ability in the paint­ ing of verbal pictures#

Often the imagery is nature-imagery,

but by way of the Bible#

6 Faust and Johnson, op. cit., p. evil. 7

# P* cviii.

When he needed briars and brambles, pastures and water brooks, a cloud the size of a man's hand, the high places of the forest, he took them from 3>avid and the Prophets and the Evangelists, as though he had never had a farm boyhood of his own, and had not every year of his life spent weeks in lonely horseback Journeys through woods, breathtaking in their spring and autumn beauty. • • .so far as the thoughts he brought back had need to cloak themselves in images, he took them from the Bible, sel­ dom from his own observations.8 His animal pictures are biblieal; "angry wild beasts," "lion of the forests,1? "like a moth,1? "worm," "spider," "the old serpent."

The imprecatory sermons, where the Imagery is most 9 frequent, depend entirely upon biblical figures* 2. Word-pairs.

Edwards often employed word-pairs.

Sometimes they were mere ornamental alliterative pleonasms, such as "search and seek," and "mildness and mercy." often, however, they were supplementary groups;

More

"labors and

sufferings," "prepossession and desire," "congruous and fit," "remembered and commemorated."

Though the word-pairs are

sometimes conventional and redundant, they are not forced. "Hepetition of words and constructions is the essence of his

10 style." 3* Quiet, uninterrupted flow of language.

When Edward

was not in the midst of a theological controversy his easy-

® Ola E. Winslow, Jonathan Edwards (New York, Macmillan Company, 1940), p. 140. ^ Faust and Johnson, op. cit., p. cvlii* 10 m a . , p. exii.

94 flowing style was at its best*

His feeling for a prose ca­

dence, for euphony (since the sermons, unlike the treatises, were given orally), for rise and fall and well matched vowel sounds, is best observed in the sermons*

The following exam­

ple is typical of the stylistically better portions of the sermons: This light, and this only, has its fruit in an univer­ sal holiness of life. Ho merely notional or speculative understanding of the doctrines of religion will ever bring this. But this light, as it reaches the bottom of the heart, and changes the nature, so it will effectually dispose to an universal obedience. It shows 004*8 worthi­ ness to be obeyed and served. It draws forth the heart in a sincere love to God, which is the only principle of a true, gracious, and universal obedience; and it con­ vinces of the reality of those glorious rewards that God has promised to them that obey hirn.il Winslow suggests that Edwards* style, at its best, was n . • . a s unadorned as Bunyan’s, although lacking Bunyan’s dis12 tinction.” Edwards1 style has at least two things in common with Bunyan’s:

both were based largely upon the King James

version of the Bible; and both were unadorned and flowing. When Bunyan’s Interpreter said, f,Come in” : . . . Christian saw the picture of a very grave person hung up against the wall; and this was the fashion of it: it had eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in its hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips, the world was behind its back; it stood as if it pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang over its h e a d .13 11 A Divine and Supernatural Light * 12 iy£nsiow? pp, cit., p. 146. 1® John Bunyan, The Pilgrim1s Progress (Philadelphia, J. C. Winston Company, 1933), Part I, Chapter 3.

,

It is perhaps unfair to compare Edwards1 style with Bunyanfc,for almost any writer*s style would suffer by such a comparison*

But Edwards survives the comparison as well as

most writers would*

While his style is not as pristine in

purity as is Bunyan's, it nevertheless flows in much the same clarity and simple beauty* 4. "Hedonistic11 words*

Edwards* sermons 11* . . are

very frequently held together by a thread of such recurrent 14 words as delightful* pleasant, bright,lovely, and sweet*" These are frankly sensuous words, used in a spiritual sense* The special emotional connotations of the words flavor the sentences and paragraphs in which they appear, giving the reader (or hearer) an emotional stimulus that temporarily influences all his thought*

A good example of the use of

some of these "hedonistic" words is the following paragraph: Taste and see; never was any disappointed that made a trial. You will not only find those spiritual comforts that Christ offers you to be of a surpassing sweetness for the present, but they will be to your soul as the dawning light that shines more and more to the perfect day; and the issue of all will be your arrival in heaven, that land of rest, those regions of everlasting Joy, where your peace and happiness will be perfect, without the least mixture of trouble or affliction, and never be interrupted nor have an end.ls Undoubtedly the frequent use of these emotionally pleasant

^

Eaust and Johnson, ojs. c it *, p. exii.

15 "peace I Leave with You"*

96 words is a factor in the beauty of Edwards* style• This poetie quality, rather than the fear-provoking elements in his sermons, may have been the reason for his power over audiences*

Townsend suggests this.

Much has been made of the awful and compelling logic which he employed in his sermons, with the implication that he held sway over his people by the power of his logic. A more likely supposition in the face of what we know about audiences is that they were held by the poetic magnetism of the man.l$ TownsendTs statement, if true, tends to confirm the thesis of this paper, that Edwards was first of all an aesthetielan* And there seems good reason to believe that it is true.

^ H. Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the tTnited States (New York and Gincinnaii, American !Book"lTompany, 1934), p'. "58.'

CHAPTER XX EDWARDS THE CONTRADICTION Consistency is not generally considered a criterion of greatness.

If It were, many or most of the men we now regard

as great would have to occupy a lower place in our estimations. If a man is regarded as great it is usually for some special impact upon or contribution to society, not for the consistency of his thought*

Many a fully consistent thinker has gone to

near or complete oblivion in spite of his consistency (Kierke* gaard and Barth might say because of iti).

One should not be

surprised to find in great thinkers opposite and perhaps irrecon­ cilable elements. This is true of Christian as well as secular thinkers. Two Christian thinkers will serve as convenient illustrations. The first is St* Augustine.

The great North African bishop is

generally regarded as the greatest Christian thinker since St. Paul.

But he was by no means fully consistent.

His great

concept of grace is fundamentally at variance with his eeelesiasticism.

Catholics and Protestants both quote Augustine to

support their doctrines-~the former to support their concept of the Church and the sacraments, the latter to support their views of grace and (sometimes) predestination.

The Reforma­

tion and Counter-Reformation both drew much ammunition from him; Warfield states that the Reformation was essentially a battle between the Augustine of grace and the Augustine of

98 1 the Church. Calvin also had contradictory emphases within his system.

This runs contrary to the popular impression, ac­

cording to which Calvin was the high-priest of Protestant scholasticism, with a fully developed, fully consistent system.

Actually, CalvinTs system, though consistent with­

in certain areas, is far from consistent in the over-all view of its major emphases.

On the one hand is the authori­

tarian, bihlicistic, logic-bound Calvin, who is chiefly re­ membered for his teaching on the sovereignty of Cod and pre­ destination.

On the other hand is the Calvin of Protestant

pneumatology, who saw in the inner witness of the Spirit a corroboration of the external revelation of Cod.

The incon­

sistency here is one of emphasis, not of logic; the inner witness of the Sirit may co-exist logically with the external revelation in the Bible.

But the two may not long co-exist

as major emphases within the same system.

As Dumergue points

out, Calvin at this point anticipates the modern theologies

Z

which base everything on Christian experience. vin did not so intend it, %

Though Gal­

. * the doctrine of the inner

3* Seen by the present writer in an old issue of the Princeton Theological Review which he is unable to locate. 2 Referred to in A. Dakin, Calvinism (Hew York, Mac­ millan Company, 1946), p. 185.

witness of the Spirit was a step in the direction of that movement which eventually destroyed the external authority both of Bible and Church and substituted for it an authority 3 of the human mind*n Edwards had a contradiction similar to Calvin’s* Sometimes he also is the cold dogmatist* living only in the abstractions of logic and reason*

At other times he is the

warm9 experiential theologian who could write that true re­ ligion consists essentially in emotion.

Like Calvin, he is

unaware of his opposing self-contradictory emphases*

This

contradiction appears in several particulars: 1* Authoritarianlsm-experientialism*

At times Edwards

speaks like an officer who tells his men that they must obey because the general has commanded; at other times he sounds like a friend advising others that if they will follow a cer­ tain course of action and belief thejr will experience the joys to be found therein*

though these are not logically

contradictory (since one could obey a command but still find personal satisfaction in the act), they cannot long coexist as emphases*

One must soon give way to the other* — emotions*

The contrast between these two

elements of Edwards’ thought may be represented by the differ­ ence between two of his ma^or treatises, Freedom qf the Will

? rbid., p. 186

and the Treatise on Religious Affections.

It is primarily

Edwards the abstract, metaphysical theologian who speaks in the former; in the latter it is Edwards the pastor who speaks.

The former grew out of theological controversy; the

latter out of "existential" situations (such as the Kew Eng­ land revivals). 3.

Rear— love.

It is especially interesting to ob­

serve how Edwards ends his sermons.

Sometimes he concludes

with an exhortation to believe in order to escape hell.

At

other times he concludes with a tender note of love, saying that we should come to God and love Him because His beauty is so great as to draw us to Him.

It is part of the thesis of

this paper that the latter emphasis is more typical of the real Edwards than the former; in the latter we encounter the true genious of the man. — pleasure.

Two motives for human conduct and

belief run parallel in Edwards:

man must obey God because it

is his duty to do so; and man should obey God because man's greatest pleasure is to be found in such obedience,

like the

contrasts above, these motives are not logically contradic­ tory.

But as major opposing emphases they could not forever

be held in equipoise.

Hor were they.

Some men after Edwards

fastened on to the rigid Calvinistic side of Edwards; these were the "old~school" theologians.

Others took the experien­

tial side; these were the pre-transcendentalists.

CHAPTER X EVALUATION At least two criticisms have been made of Edwards1 aesthetic theory*

It is obvious, of course, that many more

could be made, since one’s criteria of criticism would de­ pend upon one’s own particular aesthetic theory#

The follow­

ing, however, are largely independent of any "position," and have comparative objectivity# Perhaps the most obvious criticism is that Edwards in­ troduced the category of quantity as a criterion of quality# This emphasis appears in many different places throughout his works.

In The Nature of True Virtue, for example, he

says that . . . if Being, simply considered, be the first object of a truly virtuous benevolence, then that Being who has most of Being, or has the greatest share of existence, other things being equal, so far as such a being is ex­ hibited to our faculties or set in our view, will have the greatest share of the propensity and benevolent affection of the heart#3* In a footnote to the previous quotation Edwards adds an ex­ planatory comment: • • • one Being may have more existence than another, as he may be greater than another• That which is great, has more existence, and is further from nothing, than that which is little# One Being may have everything positive belonging to it, or every thing which goes to its posi­ tive existence (in opposition to defect) in a higher

1 Works, II, p. 268

102 degree than another: or a greater capacity and power, greater understanding, every faculty and every positive quality in a higher degree* An archangel must he supposed to have more existence, and to be every way further removed from nonentity, than a worm, or a flea*2 *3 Further on in the same treatise, in the chapter on secondary heauty, he applies his doctrine of Being to aesthetics* Another thing observable concerning this kind of beauty ^[secondary beauty) , is, that it affects the mind more (other things being equal) when taken notice of in objects which are of considerable importance, than in little trivial matters, Thus the symmetry of the parts of a human body, or countenance, affects the mind more than the beauty of a tree. So, the beauty of the solar system, more than as great and as manifold an order and uniformity in a tree. And the propotions of the parts of a church, or a palace, more than the same proportions in some little slight compositions, made to please child­ ren.^ Thus the bigger, other things being equal, is the more beau­ tiful*

We who live in the age of the microscopic find it easy to judge one such as Edwards who lived in the age of the macro­ scopic.

Our microscopes have shown us realms of beauty of

which man previously had been entirely ignorant*

Pre-micro-

scoplc man could not be expected to have known the beauty of a snowflake or the structure of a flower.

Even the micro­

scope might not have altered Edwards* aesthetics, however,

2

Ibid., II, pp. 268-269.

® A typical modern, disbelieving in agels, would doubtless say that a flea had more existence than an angel. This would be especially true of one who own&d a dog. 4 Works, II, p. 274.

103 since his view of the inferiority of the small was based more on inference from the doctrine of Being than from em5 pirical observation* To criticize Edwards for introducing quantity into a discussion of quality (beauty) is not to say that there is no quantitative aspect to quality*

It is evident that aes­

thetics as we know it today involves a considerable quanti­ tative element,

The spatial arts, as distinguished from the

temporal (such as music, which employs the successive), may be analyzed in terms of definite, measurable relationships* Typical of the experimentation done in this area is Fechner’s experimentation on Adolf Zeising's hypothesis of a ^golden section,” in which the smaller division is to the larger as the latter is to the sum (as in a cross)*

There is also a

quantitative, or better, measurable, element in the temporal arts:

music has its basic laws of tone relationship, which

are specifically measurable in terms of the diatonic and chromatic scales; and these scales are measurable in terms of the number of vibrations per second in each of their notes. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that what we call quality in art is actually the relationship of quantities;

® This keen observer was. What is point Edwards

is not meant to imply that Edwards was not a of nature. His childhood essays prove that he meant here, however, is simply that at this is essentially deductive*

104 this is essentially Edwards* own definition of secondary beauty.

But Edwards is elsewhere not so subtle, saying that

sheer mass increases beauty, other things being equal.

This

is so patently erroneous that even an aesthetic novice could easily see its fault. Townsend, agreeing that Edwards’ aesthetic philosophy is defective at this point, endeavors to get behind the words Edwards used to the motive that prompted them.

Was Edwards,

he asks, trying to express in this crude doctrine what others have called the sublime?

Referring to the above-quoted state­

ment that secondary beauty "affects the mind more** in larger objects, Townsend says that by these words the matter is put in the realm of psychology rather than of metaphysics.

Thus

interpreted, bigness is more beautiful than smallness, not because the relationships which are the essence of beauty are any more beautiful* but because bigness fills one with awe and thus inclines one’s heart to a contemplation of divine things• If he really meant that the solar system has more be­ ing than a tree, it sounds like nonsense; but If he meant that in contemplation of the solar system men get nearer the fullness of the beauty of the divine being than they are likely to get in contemplation of the tree., he is probably correct as a matter of psychological fact. Pleasure in the beauty of a tree more easily terminates in some pragmatic or activistic judgment. The fragmentariness of a tree is more compelling and diverts the mind from the perception of divine beauty*6

6 H. G. Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States (Eew York and Cincinnat i , American SooF~Company, 1§34), pp. 60-61.

105 This seems to be a most sane and fair statement, though Joyce Kilmer might have taken exception to it*

If it is true, the

(unconscious) criterion for beauty is the ability to incline one’s heart to God* I cannot think that this a clumsy expression of what which he was filled when he ens* Edwards would seem to and impressive beauty which

idea in Edwards is more than Kant denominated the awe with contemplated the starry heav­ say--the sublime is that vast nears the vision of the divine*?

A second criticism of Edwards is that with all hie de­ light in secondary beauty he could find no way from it to God# It was stated above that the ability of an object*s beauty to incline one’s heart to God was perhaps for Edwards an uncon­ scious criterion for beauty* reasoned criterion*

But it was not a conscious,

Quite the opposite*

Secondary beauty was

in no way connected with virtue of any kind* * f * a relish of these things does not depend on general benevolence, or any benevolence at all to any Being what­ soever, any more than a man’s loving the taste of honey, or his being pleased with the smell of a rose* A taste of this inferior beauty in things immaterial, is one thing which has been mistaken by some moralists, for a true virtuous principle, implanted naturally in the hearts of all mankind.® This is not to be interpreted as meaning that Edwards should have gone to Ruskin-like extremes in the indent if ication of beauty with virtue*

An objective view of aesthetics

will lead one to say that morality and beauty are often dis­ connected*

Byron was a profligate; Chopin lived in immorality

? Ibid., p. 61. ® ghe Kature of Iroe Virtue (Works. II, p. 277).

with George Sands Tschaikovski was a homosexual; Oscar Wilde had his erotic difficulties; Poe was a dope addict*

Edwards

was certainly right when he wrote (as quoted before) that secondary beauty has no direet or necessary connection with virtue• For* otherwise, men*s delight in the beauty of squares and cubes* and regular polygons, In the regularity of buildings* and the beautiful figures in a piece of em­ broidery, would increase in proportion to men*s virtue Edwards was realistic enough, in spite of his philosophical idealism, to admit that the beautiful was not always the good In his attempt to be true to the facts, however, Ed­ wards may have gone to an extreme*

Instead of saying that

secondary beauty has no necessary connection with virtue (which almost all willuadmit), and then stopping* Edwards went all the way in saying that the two have no direct con­ nection at all*

In his attempt to avoid the position to

which Ruskin later came, he missed what Shaftesbury and Hutcheson understood* that the presence of a beautiful ob­ ject inclines the heart to God*

As Townsend says,

* * * Such a belief could quite easily have been recon­ ciled with the logical structure of his philosophy by showing that what passes among men for appreciation of beauty is sham and falseness unless it does reach out to embody the love of God or "Being, simply considered*”3.0

9 Wo£ks, II; P* 277 ("Hature of True Virtue")* 10 ibid** p* 59*

The best refutation of this element of Edwards' thought is Edwards himself; there is good evidence that his metaphysical teaching on beauty was grounded in his early experiences of nature's beauty (secondary beauty) in the Connecticut Valley* But Edwards, of course, could not regard the matter objective­ ly and recognize this*

In essence, this second criticism is

that *. . . he failed to discover any means of using the exper­ ience of sensuous beauty to draw the mind to the supersensuous

11 love of God*"

He would not extend to others the possibility

of the experience by which he himself had been drawn to an

12 appreciation of primary beauty.

Townsend, oj>* cit., p. 60. 12 Edwards seems to be not entirely consistent at this point. Though at times he says there is no connection be­ tween secondary beauty and virtue, at other times he seems to partially contradict this. For example, in his emphasis upon secondary beauty as analogical to primary beauty he seems to establish some connection between secondary beauty and virtue. Perhaps the seeming contradiction between the two emphases may be resolved by saying that for Edwards there is a con­ nection between secondary beauty and virtue, but no necessary or direct connection*

CHAPTER XI SUMMARY

It is the thesis of this paper that the aesthetic plays an important, even all-important, role in the thought of Jona­ than Edwards.

The importance of beauty in Edwards can he seen

in the many appearances of the word or its synonym, excellency all through his works; he speaks of God, Christ, nature, prov­ idence, and human character as beautiful.

Another important

concept in Edwards is that of proportion or one of its syno­ nyms:

order, agreement, relation, concord or consent (his

technical term); there is evidence that even his theological thought can be analyzed in terms of proportion and three of its basic implications— correspondence, centrality and balance A careful analysis of his early *Notes on the Mind* reveals that beauty and proportion are not two separate concepts, but one, since proportion (and equality) are the basis of beauty* This proportion-beauty is further defined in *The Nature of True Virtue,” in which the two kinds of beauty are distin­ guished:

primary beauty, the consent of Being to Being, is

the beauty of divine things; secondary beauty is the beauty of natural objects, and consists in symmetry and proportion* The former beauty has a direct relation to virtue, the latter does not.

No beauty is perceived rationally, but intuitively;

and to the saints is given a special *divine and supernatural sense* to enable them to appreciate primary beauty, which can­ not be perceived or appreciated apart from this sense*

1G9 Edwards cannot be strictly classified in any

formal

aesthetic school, but has much in common with many

different

groups, especially the hedonists or eudaemonists.

The primary

aesthetic influence upon him was Francis Hutcheson, from whom Edwards probably derived the concept of virtue as beauty.

So

all-prevailing is beauty in his system that even his literary style is affected; Edwards* prose at times approaches quality of poetry,

the

like many great thinkers, he is not

en­

tirely consistent in his thought; the two strains of authori­ tarianism and experientialism run parallel in his works, are never resolved.

but

Two general criticisms may be made of Ed­

wards* view of the aesthetic: he makes the category of tity a criterion of quality; and, with all his delight

quan­ in

secondary beauty, he finds no way from it to God* The importance of beauty has been shown.

But what ap-

pears to be its function? Townsend has summarized the

issue

well: The number of times that the word "beauty" or its syn­ onym appears in his works is impressive. It appears more naturally at the end of an argument than at the beginning. We find it at the end of nearly every sustained flight of his thought. This suggests, although of course it does not prove, that he found the resolution of his doubts in the hypothesis that the~universe is beautTfuTTl IE the secret places of His experience, aesthetic resolutions of­ fered peculiar satisfaction.^ 1 Italics not in the original. 8 H. G, Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States {Hew York and Cincinnati, American Book Company,' 1954), p . *)&•

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. PRIMARY SOURCES Edwards, Jonathan, the Works of President Edwards# Hew York, Leavitt and Allen, 1865, Being a reprinFoYThe Worcester Edition# ,4 vols* B. SECONDARY SOURCES Allen, Alexander Y# G#, Jonathan Edwards# Boston and New York# Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889# 401 pp# Faust, Clarence H. , and Johnson, fhornas E # , Representative Selections from Jonathan Edwards# New York and Cincinnati, American BookCompany, 1935. 534 pp* Harountunian, Joseph, *Jonathan Edwards: theologian of the Great Commandment,11 theology today, 1:561-577, October, 1944* McOiffert, Arthur C., Junior, Jonathan Edwards. London, Harper and Brothers, 1952# 225 pp.

New York and

Miller, Perry, editor, Images and Shadows of Divine things# New Haven, Yale Uni vers ity'^P'ress , 1948 * 16l pp# , Jonathan Edwards * New York, William Sloan Associates, 1949* &&& pp* Parks, Henry B . , Jonathan Edwards, the Fiery Puritan* York, Minton Balch and Company, T93U7 2 7 l p p •

New

Rhoades, Donald H * , nJonathan Edwards: Experimental theologian*" Unpublished Doctorfs dissertation, Yale University, 1946* 530 pp, townsend, Harvey C*, Philosophical Ideas in the United gates * New York and Cincinnati, American Book^Compariy, 1931T 293 pp* Winslow, Ola E * , Jonathan Edwards * New York, the Macmillan Company, 1940" 406 pp*

IIS C. WORKS OF AESTHETICS Langfeld, Herbert S., The Aesthetie Attitude* court, Brace and Howe, 1920# 287 pp, ' Rader, Melvin, A M o d e m Book of Esthetics# Holt and Company, 1935. 554 pp*

New York, Har

New York, Henry

Sully, James, "Aesthetics," Encyclopedia Britannica, edition, I, 378-289.

11th

B# GENERAL WORKS Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim*s Progress# Philadelphia, The J# C# Winston Company, i933. 338 pp # Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religion# New York, E, P* But­ ton and Company, 19087 SFSFO pp* Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion# Phila­ delphia, PresTbyterianToa'rd of Christian Education, 1936# Yol* I, 838 pp. Bakin, Arthur, Calvinism# Few York, The Macmillan Company, 1946# 303 pp* Fewman, John H . , The Grammar of Assent* Few York and London, Longman, Green and Company, 19l7# 303 pp* Raskin, John, Modern Painters# Few York, J# Wiley, I860* Yols# I and IY* Truehlood, B* Elton, The Logic of Belief* Few York and Lon­ don, Harper and Brothers, 19127 343 pp#