SOURCE: Henigman, Laura. “Flowing and Reflowing: Dialogic Emanations.” In Coming into Communion: Pastoral Dialogues in Colonial New England, pp. 151-76. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Henigman analyzes the manner in which Jonathan Edwards appropriated and revised his wife's account of her experiences and used it in his own writing.]

In the winter of 1742, western Massachusetts was in the midst of a religious revival. People throughout the commonwealth—and in other colonies as well—were reporting extraordinary experiences of the Holy Spirit. Seven years previously, the towns of the Connecticut Valley had provided a preview of the current revival, and Northampton's minister, Jonathan Edwards, had published a widely read account, called A Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions, of the way in which the Spirit swept through the region, affecting all manner of people with religious renewal, causing many to join the church, and to have hopeful thoughts that they were saved. In 1740, the Spirit had returned to a more widespread area, and Northampton was again the center of attention: the most famous analyst of religious psychology still ministered there.¹ As the revival continued for several years, ministers came visiting, with many people stopping in at the Edwards house, and Jonathan Edwards was invited to preach in various places throughout the Valley. In January 1742, he left for a two-week trip to Leicester.

It was in some ways a bad time for him to leave. Sarah, his wife, kept the household together in Jonathan's absence, as people continued to gather at the Edwards house to pray together, to talk, and to exchange their own spiritual experience and to remark on the spectacular way in which the Spirit had returned to Northampton. In the midst of all this activity, Sarah had an extraordinary experience herself, one that lasted for about ten days. Even as people were passing in and out of her house, she would lose strength, overwhelmed by the sense of the Spirit, and have to lie down for hours at a time. Possessed by a supernatural energy, she would leap up, only to sink down. She would grow cold and faint, and have to be carried off to bed. For two full nights, Thursday and Friday, January 28th and 29th, she lay in bed in a state of half-wakefulness, having the nearest thing to a vision that Puritan orthodoxy would allow: “All night I continued in a constant, clear and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent and transcendent love, of his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him. … I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven, into my heart, in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet light. … It seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain, of that fullness of joy, which is felt by those, who behold the face of Christ, and share his love in the heavenly world.” “It was,” she would say of it, “the sweetest night I ever had in my life.”² So remarkable was Sarah Edwards's experience of enspiritedness, in fact, that upon learning of it after his return home, Jonathan asked her to write an account of all she had felt while he was gone.

She sat down to write that account, however, laboring under the burden of what was already the formidable reputation of her husband. Shepherd of the religious awakenings that were currently sweeping through most of New England and beyond, and their most prominent defender against skeptics, Jonathan Edwards had started his pastoral career in Northampton as heir apparent to the great divine Solomon Stoddard, dubbed “Pope” of the Connecticut River Valley for his dominance there; by the time of these current awakenings, Edwards had already influenced numerous students at Yale. Most immediate on Sarah's mind as she wrote, though, must have been the fact that in these heady days of what would come to be called the Great Awakening, her husband had asked her for this narrative, intending, she might have suspected, to use it in his next defense of those religious revivals. She was about to enter, in other words, the very public and vitriolic world of print. And indeed, in Jonathan's next published work, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival of Religion, Sarah Edwards's experience is featured prominently, albeit disguised and reshaped, to epitomize the current awakenings.

This textual interchange epitomizes the tensions and collaborations of the pastoral relationship. Jonathan Edwards would use Sarah's “Narrative” to his own ends, hiding her identity and even her gender by referring to her only as “the person,” removing all identifying narrative details and social context, reshaping her experience to fit his own theory of religious psychology. Sarah, who stood in relation to Jonathan not only as a wife but as a congregant for all of her adult life, thus entered the public conversation about the phenomenon of the revival, but only at a cost. In using her text as he does, stripping it of its specificity and much of its character, Jonathan respects Sarah's privacy and dignity. He protects her from the public ridicule of writers like Charles Chauncy who had discredited the awakenings as the undisciplined outpourings of women, children, and servants, disguising her so successfully, in fact, that some eighteenth-century readers were convinced that “the person” must have been Jonathan himself.³ He protected her privacy, but he also appropriated her experience. Her original manuscript has now been lost, and the only reason we have something resembling it is that Sereno Dwight, her great-grandson, printed it in his nineteenth-century biography of Jonathan Edwards, part of an attempt to extend his legacy further.⁴ That text is itself justly suspect, as are all nineteenth-century printings of colonial works, which tended to modernize and otherwise simplify the language. The story of Sarah Edwards's “Narrative,” therefore, encapsulates the ambivalent power relations that we have seen working in one way or another with respect to all the women's texts we have looked at. Our access to the original text is compromised, made to serve a clerical agenda.

There is a legend among Edwards biographers that the marriage of Jonathan and Sarah was an extraordinarily loving and intimate one. Samuel Hopkins reported that Jonathan on his deathbed spoke of the “uncommon union” he had with Sarah; Perry Miller began his biography with the anecdote that a minister once told Jonathan that his wife was going to heaven “by a shorter road than himself,” to which he nodded silently; and most dramatically, Jonathan Edwards's own apostrophe to Sarah Pierrepont, written in his notebook four years before their marriage, has provided fodder for its romanticization by biographers. Modern readers of Sarah Edwards's “Narrative,” however, have been skeptical of this portrait, believing that her “Narrative” exposes significant tensions between them. Her experience of that January, some have argued, constituted a rebellion against ministerial authority; it was a performance before the people of Northampton betraying the conflicts that existed between the Edwards family and the town; it represented her appropriation of clerical teaching power.⁵ One scholar has even argued that it had a long-term effect of distancing them from each other, and contributing together with his general disappointment in the revivals, to Jonathan's growing disillusionment with community life, so that his later writings “disparag[e] the moral value of natural human love.”⁶ Birth records show that during their married life, Sarah conceived a child every two years, but 1742 is an exception; and a December 1742 note from the town doctor to Jonathan Edwards, preserved because in an age of scarce paper he used the back of it for sermon notes, offers a remedy for a condition the doctor called “Hysterickall Originall,” implying that Sarah had some sort of gynecological problem that year that might have interrupted her childbearing.⁷ This evidence reminds us that for Sarah Edwards, as for other colonial women, the reproductive cycle was a constant and present feature of life. Whether we read it as signalling a temporary emotional estrangement between her and her husband or a physical consequence of her unusual spiritual experience (or perhaps just a random medical occurrence), it is clear that that event was disruptive to the Edwards household, the Edwards marriage, and the Edwards pastoral relationship, in more ways than one.

The pastoral/marital relationship is indeed one of the problematic issues in Sarah Edwards's “Narrative.”. At the very beginning, she reports that the trigger for her spiritual experience is her unease at a rebuke from her husband for her having “failed in some measure in point of prudence” in her dealings with another minister (Dwight, 172). Her concern for losing “the good opinion of my husband” testifies that the marital relation in Puritan theory and practice was one in which the husband's role was to instruct and rebuke his wife. Jonathan Edwards himself wrote as much in his “Miscellanies”: “When a woman is married to an husband she receives him as a guide, as a protector, a safeguard, and defense. … God has so designed it, and therefore has made man of a more robust [nature] … with more wisdom, strength and courage, fit to protect and defend.”⁸ A stable union, however uncommon it may have been, depended on that hierarchy. The husbandly role Jonathan describes here sounds very much like a clerical one.

Sarah reports that Jonathan's rebuke to her behavior pushes her, as any husband or minister might, to even further depths of self-examination, with results that have both pastoral and marital implications. She imagines, for example, as an exercise in self-abnegation, “the feelings and conduct of my husband … chang[ing] from tenderness and affection, to extreme hatred and cruelty” (Dwight, 183). On the other hand, one of the themes of her “Narrative” is her struggles with professional jealousy on her husband's behalf: she steels herself to accept the possibility that Samuel Buell, who was substituting for him in his absence, and others might have more success in stimulating a revival than Jonathan himself. It is either profoundly ironic, then, or evidence of a passive kind of rebellion, that Sarah's own experience took place in the absence of her husband and usual clerical supervisor.

One of the primary features of the Great Awakening itself was its disruption of normal pastoral relationships. The Awakening was noteworthy for both its assertion of lay experience over and against clerical authority and for the phenomenon of itineracy: unattached celebrity ministers, like the British Methodist George Whitefield, who made a grand tour of the colonies, and, more infamously, New England's own James Davenport, who in his travels in New England stirred up all manner of disorderly behavior, including a book burning, before finally recanting in 1744.⁹ Exciting things could happen, the people of New England were realizing, when church routines were broken, or more precisely, when the institutional relationship between congregation and minister, mutually defining roles in the congregational tradition, were disrupted.¹⁰ Jonathan Edwards himself had preached his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God to a much greater effect as a visitor in neighboring Enfield than he had in his own Northampton.

Was Sarah struggling with her subordination to her husband, and to the clerical class generally? Was she breaking free of his influence by having this spectacular experience independent of him, using it, finally, to detach herself from his influence?¹¹ Given the pertinence of these questions, it is important to look more deeply into the meaning of Jonathan Edwards's solicitation of Sarah Edwards's written narrative. Was it, and his subsequent editing and disguising of it, an attempt to reassert control over his wife and congregant? Or was it, more broadly, an attempt to reassert his clerical mastery over lay experience? In some ways, the two versions we have—Dwight's printing of Sarah's manuscript and Jonathan's summary of it in Some Thoughts—vie for authority. But to say that Jonathan revised Sarah Edwards's “Narrative” is also to say that he was a reader. His revision reflects their pastoral relationship, constituting, in a sense, a dialogue, and showing both how he controlled her and what he valued in and learned from her. I will argue, in fact, that his revision both fits and challenges his own theological agenda.

THE DANGER OF NARRATIVE

It certainly was not, generally speaking, Jonathan Edwards's practice to slip others' words into his writings. His own powerful mind had to make everything its own. In the case of his revisions of Sarah's “Narrative,” he leaves out details that we find most interesting—Sarah's struggles with professional jealousy on his behalf, and her interest in psalms. He attributes a sense of sinfulness to “the person” stronger than what comes through in her own writing. And, most notably, he takes out the narrative element of her account, reducing her experiences to a list of symptoms. It is for this last that Edwards has been most roundly criticized by modern readers.¹² Formally speaking, this revision expresses his deep suspicion of the narrative form.

Jonathan, of course, wrote his own spiritual autobiography, known as the “Personal Narrative.” He also included the famous stories of Phoebe Bartlet and Abigail Hutchinson in the earlier A Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions (the account of the 1735 Northampton revival); and he was later to edit and publish the Diary of David Brainerd. All these personal narratives, like his retelling of Sarah's, were to be exempla of some sort. And yet it is also the case that the personal narrative could hardly be said to be Edwards's genre of choice.

After being dismissed from Northampton in 1750, Edwards wrote from Stockbridge to a Scottish colleague that he regretted his handling of the awakenings there, especially his tolerance of the people's interest in relating their conversion experiences. That practice, he said at that time, led to spiritual pride and encouraged too much interest in “the particular steps and method” of the first conversion at the expense of attention to “the abiding sense of temper of their hearts.”¹³ Narrative itself was the problem. He regretted even the publication of his own Faithful Narrative, which, in telling the story of Northampton's awakening, had the effect of creating a spiritual smugness and carelessness about the rest of the life.

While it is understandable that Edwards would have felt this way in 1751, it is also the case that all his writings on the Awakening, including A Faithful Narrative, sustain a tension between narrative of the type he describes here and analysis of the phenomenon in the aggregate. Most often, he is less interested in telling individual stories than in describing the work of the Spirit. His argument is always that the Spirit is a historical force that cannot be limited to any pattern: “The Wind bloweth where it listeth.”¹⁴ This is why narrative, though seductive, is so problematic. Although the particulars of religious experience must be attended to and judged carefully, there is no pattern that can be pointed to; individual conversions are “surprising” in their unpredictability.

Even as Edwards continues to write more and more defensively in The Distinguishing Marks, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revivals, and Religious Affections, what distinguishes these analyses most is that they refuse to codify, even as they seem to claim to do so. What are the distinguishing marks of the Spirit? There are none that are conclusive. Any particular outward manifestation is not infallible proof of the work of God; neither is it proof that the Spirit is not working. His is a very different kind of analysis, from, say, William James's typology of the sick soul and the healthy-minded soul and also, in another way, from both the Puritan morphologists who preceded Edwards, and the hagiographical impulse found in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, both of which establish a master-narrative for the saint's life.¹⁵ It should follow, then, that the experience of individuals might be of little use to Edwards in his polemic. Even in his earliest writings, he anticipates what he would cite in that 1751 letter as the danger: that any narrative might suggest that there are limits to the way the Spirit works. People fall into the trap of spiritual pride when they think that any one story of conversion should provide a pattern. Despite the conspicuous exceptions to his normal procedure, despite his primary interest in the psychology of spiritual experiences, Edwards then approaches the writing of biography only very gingerly. Given his wariness about publishing specific accounts of the work of the Spirit that might take away from the historical force of the event, it is remarkable that Sarah Edwards's “Narrative” appears to have been one in whose validity he had the utmost confidence. If he muted the specifically narrative aspects of her texts, his focus on “the person” in that section of Some Thoughts is nevertheless a kind of homage to his wife.

THE BODY ENSPIRITED

Moreover, in revising her “Narrative” he chooses to highlight what is perhaps its most potentially disruptive—and, for his audience, the most controversial—element: her location of spirituality in bodily experience. He meticulously lists all the bodily effects she reports: “the strength of the body taken away, so as to deprive of all ability to stand or speak; sometimes the hands clinched, and the flesh cold, but senses still remaining; animal nature often in a great emotion and agitation, and the soul very often, of late, so overcome with great admiration, and a kind of omnipotent joy, as to cause the person (wholly unavoidably) to leap with all the might, with joy and mighty exultation of soul; the soul at the same time being so strongly drawn towards God and Christ in heaven, that it seemed to the person as though soul and body would, as it were of themselves, of necessity mount up, leave the earth and ascend thither.”¹⁶ He tells his readers, using language similar to hers, that Sarah was reporting bodily states involving excess energy (forceful leaping), energy drain, or dissociative states similar to possession or trance.

We cannot overestimate the importance of this feature of Sarah's—and Jonathan's—report, for such bodily experiences had come to symbolize a collection of central issues surrounding the Awakening. Charles Chauncy, an Awakening opponent and Edwards's most immediate polemical adversary, had ridiculed precisely this feature, in his latest salvo, Letter to Wishart. His sarcastic words read almost as a caricature of Sarah Edwards's experience: “Mr Whitefield's Doctrine of inward Feelings began to discover itself in Multitudes, whose sensible Perceptions arose to such a Height, as that they cried out, fell down, swooned away, and, to all Appearance, were like Persons in Fits; and this, when the Preaching (if it may be so called) had in it as little well digested and connected good Sense, as you can well suppose.”¹⁷ For Chauncy, revivalists' contempt for the usual ministerial credentials, their valuing of inward feelings over outward conformity to church discipline, found an apt physical enactment in the bodies of those multitudes, who cried out, fell down, swooned away: an image of disorder so profoundly alien as to signal at best false experiences and imposter preaching, and at worst a dangerous and widespread social breakdown. Other reports of devilish dancing, burning books, and even illicit pregnancies were similarly given in horrified tones by Awakening critics, for whom again and again disorderly bodies embodied all the challenges to established authorities that they feared in the awakenings.¹⁸

Mary Douglas has written helpfully about the way in which the particular variations of bodily symbolism found in a given culture may signal its social patterning, or, in her words, “attitudes to bodily control [match] attitudes to social control.”¹⁹ Specifically, societies in which trance states are looked upon as benign spiritual experiences, she predicts, should be societies in which social controls are relatively relaxed; conversely, highly structured societies adopt religious symbols that emphasize bodily control and would look upon trance states with suspicion and fear.

Although Douglas's comments are meant to suggest a typology of societies, they may also provide a key to understanding the sociology of religious controversy. The Awakening converts, and Sarah Edwards, did not experience trance states exactly. But they did report—and others, friend and foe alike, observed—bodily manifestations of various kinds. Viewed with respect to Douglas's model, Chauncy's reaction to the fits and swoons he heard about is clear enough: he finds in them an image—an unnatural image—of social disorder. His attitude testifies to his own investment in an ordered society with complex and intricate structures—or better, his belief that society is so structured. The experience of bodily abandonment testified to by Sarah and others, on the other hand, was interpreted by them not as a sign of disorder but as a sign of the Spirit, signaling their perception of society as less structured.²⁰ For them, rather than signaling the dangerous dissolution of order, the bodily experience of spirituality connects them to the sacred.²¹

The meaning of Jonathan Edwards's reaction to Sarah's experience is less clear. Reporting her experience as a work of the Spirit, he nevertheless takes great pains to show that Sarah's enspiritedness does not lead to the disorderliness caricatured by the Awakening opponents. He stresses that “the person,” despite her unusual and remarked upon experience, was not inclined to sweep aside pedestrian responsibilities and civilities, attending to “worldly business … with great alacrity”—the business, we know, of running a large household and attending to her absent husband's many guests. Nor did she succumb to spiritual pride, even at the height of her experience, or pridefully inveigh, as others did, against “the danger of an unconverted ministry,” but remained remarkably nonjudgmental and charitable toward others. In the notable passage that for Edwards can only be described as an outburst, he cries, “Now if such things are enthusiasm, and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be evermore possessed by that happy distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the world of mankind may be all seized with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatifical, glorious distraction!”²² Using the very words that commonly denigrated the revivals—“enthusiasm,” “possessed,” “distemper,” “seized,” “distraction”—he counterbalances these words with his own list of adjectives denoting beauty and orderliness.

The language he uses here is familiar from the Edwards lexicon, for it is always important to Edwards, despite his expansive generosity and openness to different types of experience, to claim that the work of the Spirit is productive of order, not disorder.²³ At least for his present controversialist purposes, then, he is just as eager to resist any evidence of relaxed social controls as Chauncy seems to be, rejecting Chauncy's intuitive sense that such bodily experience as Sarah Edwards's, which after all did keep her in bed and away from those guests for hours at a time, may suggest a less densely organized society with less firmly established roles for all its members. As such, Sarah's experience provided Jonathan with an example useful to his project of refuting Chauncy's and others' objections to bodily effects.

However, it is noteworthy that in his own “Personal Narrative,” he himself does not report such experience. This well-known text, written in 1739 but not published, was intended as a careful illustration of awakening spirituality, to be used in much the same way that he would eventually use his wife's “Narrative.” It is characterized by an extreme caution about locating spiritual experience in bodily perceptions, evincing, therefore, a method of describing conversion very different from that chosen by his wife.

To be sure, as a theorist of the religious affections, Jonathan Edwards commonly used sensory language to describe saving spiritual experience. He always made clear, however, that it was an inadequate metaphor for the “senses” of a saint. The “Personal Narrative” enacts the religious psychology he had analyzed more systematically elsewhere, dramatizing the difference between truly regenerate affections, a sign of saving grace, and mere intellectual knowledge: “I have often since not only had a conviction, but a delightful conviction.”²⁴ If he employs the language of bodily sensation throughout to illustrate that distinction, it is used always somewhat diffidently, calling attention to the purely figurative nature of the language he has chosen. “The sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden as it were, kindle up a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of soul, that I know not how to express” (JER, 284). Indeed, that sensate body, a necessary vehicle to hint, however imperfectly, at the nature of spiritual experience, consistently appears in an attitude of humility. Echoing his own God Glorified in Man's Dependence and the Bible, for example, he writes, “My heart as it were panted after this, to lie low before God, and in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that God might be all; that I might become as a little child” (JER, 288). This sentence, at once an amalgam of scriptural figures and an assertion of Edwards's Calvinist theology, points to an inherent tension: the self has substance and desires (a panting heart) and yet desires annihilation. Or, as Edwards himself puts it elsewhere in the “Personal Narrative,” “I felt withal, an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, than to be emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone” (JER, 293).

The highest kind of spiritual achievement, he believes, is a kind of self-forgetting, induced by being “filled up” or “swallowed” by God. God crowds out all other sensations. As Edwards indicates in another passage, “The sweetest joys and delights I have experienced, have not been those that have arisen from a hope of my own good estate; but in a direct view of the glorious things of the gospel. When I enjoy this sweetness, it seems to carry me above the thoughts of my own estate: It seems at such times a loss that I cannot bear, to take off my eye from the glorious, pleasant object I behold without me, to turn my eye in upon myself, and my own good estate” (JER, 292). All of these passages express the desire, paradoxical though it might be, for the desiring self to be annihilated, or, as the force of the metaphors points, to be made (or understood to be) small. While the “Personal Narrative”, like Religious Affections, Freedom of the Will and the entire Edwards corpus, teaches that true religion consists in regenerate affections (i.e., the enspirited self), that narrative also testifies that those affections derive at least from the desire for concentration of the self into a point in order to magnify God's greatness.

Most often, in fact, the spiritual experiences that overwhelm Jonathan are perceptions of God's greatness coupled with the self's smallness—of extremities, or vast distances or vast disparities in size or quantity. God is awesome not only because of these notions conjured up of loudness or largeness (the thunder contains “the majestic and awful voice of [God],” Jonathan has his best spiritual experiences when “being alone in the mountains”—JER, 285), but because God himself encompasses extremes. Edwards describes that breadth with mesmerizing chiasmic oxymorons: “I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction: majesty and meekness joined together: it was a sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness” (JER, 285).

The self also contains vast quantities—of sin—so vast as to be similarly evocative of sublime polarity. “My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long appeared to me perfectly ineffable, and swallowing up all thought and imagination; like an infinite deluge, or infinite mountains over my head.” It “swallow[s] up all thought and imagination”; it is “an abyss infinitely deeper than hell,” “bottomless” (JER, 294, 295). In a spiritual habit similar to the devotional gesture of ejaculatory prayer, Jonathan describes his sense of sin as a “heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite.” “I go about very often, for this many years, with these expressions in my mind, and in my mouth—‘Infinite upon Infinite! Infinite upon Infinite!’” (JER, 294). Even as he experiences “vehement longings” for God and “delights” in the things of religion, Edwards simultaneously seems most moved by his perception not of beauty but of sublimity, and especially sublimity that comes of the combination of the vast and the tiny, the majestic and the meek, the mind-crowding sense of disparity.²⁵ The “Personal Narrative,” then, partakes of the same aesthetic as that most memorably dramatized in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: The image of the “small and loathsome insect” hanging by a slender thread in a vast cosmos derives its power from that polarity, or disparity in size.

All this is familiar enough Edwardsean theology. It is hardly surprising to find a Calvinist of Jonathan Edwards's stature preaching the all-sufficiency of God and the entire inadequacy of the sinful soul. But we need only turn to Sarah Edwards's “Narrative” (as printed in Dwight) to see what is essentially the same theological idea articulated with a much different inflection. For Sarah reports that her ejaculatory prayer—an expression that comes out of her repeatedly without prompting and without control—is not “infinite upon infinite!” but rather “My God my all, my God my all” (Dwight, 173). Her prayer testifies to the same sense that Jonathan reported, that God is overwhelming. But while his language referred to his own sin, infinite in quantity and distancing him infinitely from God, hers suggests God's intimacy: “my God, my all.” The experience she reports of God is not Jonathan's sense of majesty but her own of God's proximity: “a continued view of God as near and as my God” (Dwight, 181). “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” she reads in Romans, thinking “with undoubted certainty … as words which God did pronounce concerning me” (Dwight, 173, emphasis added). In contrast, Jonathan's favored scripture texts suggest a remote God: “My soul breaketh for the longing it hath” (Ps. 119, 28; JER, 286), “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory” (Ps. 115.1; JER, 292). Even his quotation from Ct. 2.1, “I am the Rose of Sharon, the lily of the Valleys,” (JER, 284) “represent[s],” he says, “the loveliness and beauty of Jesus Christ,” and does not testify to nearness. While he longs to “lie low before God, and in the dust … that I might become as a little child,” (JER, 288), he means to emphasize his lowness and distance from God; when Sarah writes, “Can I now at this time, with the confidence of a child, and without the least misgiving of heart, call God my Father?” (Dwight, 172), she means by the figure that she hopes not for distance and smallness, for polarity between herself and God, but rather for a familial intimacy, one that she reports she does feel: “he then sweetly smiled upon me, with the look of forgiveness and love” (Dwight, 172), as a close and caring, rather than remote and judgmental, parent might.

These contrasts between Sarah's and Jonathan's narratives reflect a difference not in theology but in affect. For both, God overwhelms the creature. In quoting Sarah in Some Thoughts, Jonathan need have no qualms about that central theological tenet. But each explains that idea with reference to a peculiar cosmic geography, and disposition of the enspirited body within that cosmos. As we've seen in previous examples, the precise logic of bodily imagery is important because it may suggest underlying understandings both of community structures and of the individual's relationship with God. Therefore, even images that seem to belong to the same “family” (as, in the Colman-Turell exchange, sexuality and childbirth) may have widely divergent meaning attached to them. It is significant, therefore, that Jonathan both recognizes Sarah's peculiar idiom—locating spiritual experience within an overwhelmed body (as opposed to desiring the annihilation of that body)—so different from his own, and takes care to preserve and highlight it in his appropriation of her narrative in Some Thoughts.

The best illustration of his openness to her preferred language comes early in his discussion of “the person,” when he departs from his more frequent procedure of summarizing and listing Sarah's experiences, quoting from what I agree is her most striking passage: “(to use the person's own expressions) the soul remained in a kind of heavenly Elysium, and did as it were swim in the rays of Christ's love, like a little mote swimming in the beams of the sun, or streams of his life that come in at a window; and the heart was swallowed up in a kind of glow of Christ's love, coming down from Christ's heart in heaven, as a constant stream of sweet light, at the same time the soul all flowing out in love to him, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing from heart to heart.”²⁶ This is a near direct quotation from what could probably be called the peak moment of the experience she recounts in the Dwight edition:

[A]ll night I continued in a constant, clear and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent and transcendent love, or his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven, into my heart, in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet light. At the same time, my heart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ; so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly and divine love, from Christ's heart to mine; and I appeared to myself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams of the love of Christ, like the motes swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which came in at the window. My soul remained in a kind of heavenly elysium.

(Dwight, 178)

Perhaps Jonathan was interested in this passage because he recognized his own mark on it. The light metaphor, while not unusual in any Christian context, was of course one of his particular signatures, expounded most prominently in the 1734 sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, perhaps the best example among Jonathan's early printed works of his exploitation of the language of sensory perception to explain grace. Indeed, if we recall that Sarah was his congregant and student as well as his wife, it is not surprising that she should avail herself of the language and imagery she heard him use in the pulpit. But the inflection she gives the image of sunlight here, for all it shares with her husband's chosen language, is peculiar to her own style of spirituality and, ultimately, quite dissimilar to his. The paragraph I—and Jonathan—quote recalls a passage in his own “Personal Narrative” that makes extensive and dramatic use of the image and yet sounds so different. I refer to the well-known “little white flower” passage:

The soul of a true Christian, as I then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little white flower, as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom, to receive the pleasant beams of the sun's glory; rejoicing as it were, in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms, to drink in the light of the sun.

(JER, 288)

The two passages share a basic metaphor. For both Jonathan and Sarah, God is represented by the sun, infinitely large, life-giving, and yet self-sufficient, emanating rays of light that connect the creature to it. Jonathan's passage, however, enacts distance and disparity, while Sarah, using the same principle, enacts communion. Jonathan's “little white flower,” an emblem for the individual soul, is not that different from the much more terrifying image of the noxious insect in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: discrete, infinitely small bodies, outsized by the cosmos around them. God—or the sun—is infinitely large and powerful, but remote; in theologically orthodox manner, the great gap between God and creature, is crossed by the sun's rays—God's gracious doing—that hit the receptive soul (“opening its bosom”). Edwards completes his image with a vision of an elect community, in which all individual small flowers, similarly receptive, are struck by the sun's rays, or grace, and give up a beautiful refulgence, creating a harmonious and beautiful community. Like the “Personal Narrative” as a whole, though, this theological vision depends on a cosmos bounded by polarities, in which that little white flower remains small, finite, bounded. Edwards finishes his meditation by reemphasizing this idea: “my heart panted after this, to lie low before God, as in the dust, that I might be nothing, and that God might be all” (JER, 288).

We don't know if Sarah Edwards read Jonathan's narrative. She certainly would have been familiar with the image of light for the workings of grace on the creature, and Jonathan had developed it at length in his sermons, most notably in A Divine and Supernatural Light. When Sarah turns herself to that metaphor to help her explain her spiritual experiences, though, she locates her own created body not at the polar opposite of the sun, passively receiving the rays it sends down, but as motes swimming in the rays. Jonathan, or a little white flower, stays on the receiving end; Sarah climbs into the rays themselves. Jonathan's sunrays represent grace: they move in one direction and have one author, one impetus, God, leaving the little white flower only the option of receiving the sun's effects, and possibly creating more refulgence here on earth. Sarah's sunrays, she says, represent not grace but love. She receives the love of Christ and returns her own to him. Sarah thus blurs the boundaries between Creator and created that Jonathan's passage—and indeed, his whole narrative—carefully keeps distinct. Replacing grace with love, she shows that the creature shares a capacity with the creator. In the terms of the sunray metaphors, she allows the created body's boundaries to dissolve into that pathway, while her husband and pastor at all times depicts a very discretely bounded creature. Simply put, his vision of spirituality, illustrated here and enacted by his narrative as a whole, is resolutely dualistic, hers is dramatically not. Theologically speaking, she describes a much more intimate relationship with God than he does.

The contrast in their respective narratives reveals the essentially fluid nature of any religious symbolism, and illustrates how a shared language can contain significant variations in meanings and have multivalent effects, allowing equally supple uses by different members of the community to different ends. Although Sarah Edwards does not use explicitly maternal language in this passage, the language she does use, which is both body-centered and dissolving of bodily boundaries, functions similarly to the way Jane Colman Turell's maternal imagery does. As in the Colman-Turell letters, that language tends to be associated as well with a vision of congregational unity; moreover, its nondualistic character is the more evident in comparison to the language used by her main clerical advisor. The usefulness of Mary Douglas's insight, that images of bodily experience correlate with certain visions of community, is that it helps us clarify the implications of the differences between conversion narratives. Two important studies of conversion narratives from the Great Awakening, Susan Juster's and Barbara Epstein's, disagree about the gendering of community. Epstein remarks that women “expressed a particularly sharp pleasure in the sense of community created by a revival”; Juster, on the contrary, finds that men were more likely to concentrate on such communal ties in their narratives, while “women turned their energies inward in search of perfect physical subsumption into the body of Christ.”²⁷ I will argue, on the contrary, that, as Douglas predicts, in Sarah Edwards's “Narrative” at least, the sense of overcoming boundaries both bodily and communal are associated, not competing features.

Jonathan Edwards quotes and approves his wife's metaphor, in spite of the fact that it centers on bodily experiences in a way that he himself was not comfortable with in shaping his own narrative. But what Jonathan Edwards did not see in his wife's preferred idiom, what he did not choose to excerpt, was precisely this connection between the blurring of bodily boundaries and the articulation of communal oneness: Sarah Edwards's “Narrative” describes not only a body-centered spirituality, but also a vision of communitas, a communal experience of the Spirit, much better than did the language in his own “Personal Narrative.” To see that connection, we must reinsert the social into Sarah's “Narrative,” and thereby reestablish the narrative context that Jonathan has edited out.

SARAH EDWARDS IN NORTHAMPTON

Sarah's own “Narrative” conveys, of course, much more of a sense of social embeddedness than does Jonathan's analysis, providing, in fact, an interesting portrait of the complexities of life in a New England town during these revivals. As a minister's wife, Sarah would have felt the effects of this great excitement in very practical ways, including pressure on her household. During the week she describes, not only was she hosting Mr. Buell, Jonathan's replacement, but she seems to have had numerous other ministers and neighbors, some named, some not, visiting at the parsonage. Although the most spectacular aspects of her enspirited experience of these two weeks take place when she is alone—and it is these experiences that most interest Jonathan—her reconstructed narrative testifies as well to the important place community relations had in her experiences and to the spiritual style she exhibits.

The experience of community reported in Sarah's “Narrative” reflects, to some degree, the fact that Jonathan Edwards's tenure as Northampton's minister was hardly a model of harmonious pastoral relations. After his prominent involvement in the awakenings, both the more widespread ones in the early '40s and the earlier local “frontier awakening” chronicled by him in A Faithful Narrative, Jonathan had a series of important conflicts with his congregation, culminating in his ignominious firing in 1750. Like other New England congregational ministers, Edwards frequently clashed with his congregation, which was responsible for fixing and paying his salary, over money. With a year after Sarah's remarkable religious experience, both Edwardses wrote letters to the town begging that Jonathan be paid his overdue salary.²⁸ The townspeople, conscious that they were footing the bill, lodged complaints about the Edwardses' spending habits on luxurious manufactured goods, including Sarah's own dresses. Against this backdrop of financial tension, common enough in a congregational system,²⁹ there were additional sources of tension: Jonathan came in conflict with the prominent Hawley family; he offended the parents of Northampton by publicly chastising young people who had been mischievously reading a midwives' manual; and finally, reversing longstanding Northampton practice instituted by his grandfather, he set off a firestorm by declaring that those who wanted to take the Lord's Supper would now have to give a convincing relation of their saving experiences. Even the most sympathetic of Jonathan Edwards's biographers have attributed these clashes at least in part to his authoritarianism—what Perry Miller labeled his “hubris.”³⁰ Sarah Edwards no doubt experienced these conflicts painfully, and it seems poignantly apt that in her “Narrative” she reports that her great spiritual achievement seems to be her “holy indifference” to the world, especially “the opinions, the representations, and conduct of mankind respecting me” (Dwight, 177-78).³¹

This historical record describing a problematic relationship between the Edwards family and the community gives context to many otherwise odd remarks in their respective accounts. As evidence of “the person's” weanedness from the world, for example, Jonathan Edwards notes briefly in his summary that she “expressed a willingness to live and die in darkness and horror if God's honor should require it.”³² Sarah's account of what generated her statement is rather more dramatic. Noting the physically debilitating effects she was experiencing, she says that a neighbor, Mrs. P—, “had expressed her fears least I should die before Mr. Edwards' return, and he should think the people had killed his wife” (Dwight, 181). Indeed, throughout the “Narrative,” Sarah puts herself through various mental tests, to see if she has truly achieved “indifference” to the world, and these tests invariably take the form of social ostracism, prefiguring, perhaps with a little more melodrama, the Edwardses' eventual banishment from Northampton. “There was then a deep snow on the ground,” she writes, “and I could think of being driven from my home into the cold and snow, of being chased from the town with the utmost contempt and malice, and of being left to perish with the cold, as cast out by all the world, with perfect calmness and serenity” (Dwight, 174). Similarly, she could continue her spiritual equanimity, she finds, “if our house and all our property in it should be burnt up, and we should that night be turned out naked” (Dwight, 185); or “If I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me” (Dwight, 183).

When we imagine these tensions resulting from chronic community antagonisms combining with the busyness of the Edwards household during the time of the Awakening in particular, we can sympathetically picture Sarah chafing under the expectations of her role as Jonathan Edwards's wife and hostess. “When I came home,” for instance, on a Wednesday, “found Mr. Buell, Mr. Christophers, Mr. Hopkins, Mrs. Eleanor Dwight, the wife of Mr. Joseph Allen, and Mr. Job Strong, at the house. … The intenseness of my feelings again took away my bodily strength” (Dwight, 176)—not surprising to anyone who has had to entertain unexpected guests. We can also imagine that the mystical bodily connection she finds with God suggests a desire to escape from those tensions: “No possible suffering appeared to be worth regarding: all persecutions and torments were a mere nothing. I seemed to dwell on high, and the place of defence to be the munition of rocks” (Dwight, 174). For Sarah's two-week-long spiritual experience demands at times that she be alone, “withdraw[ing] to my chamber”; she reports, despite Jonathan's insistence that her enspiritedness did not interfere with her attending to her worldly duties, that on several occasions during the week she spent much of the day in bed, neglecting all those houseguests. On the day of her peak experience, Thursday, January 28, she “accidently went into the room where Mr. Buell was conversing with some of the people”; so moved by the interchange, she eventually “sunk down” and had to be carried up to bed (Dwight, 177). She lay there between twelve and four in the afternoon, surely peak entertaining and dinner-serving hours. Finally, “a little while before I arose, Mr. Buell and the people went to meeting” (Dwight, 178), leaving the house at long last.

Is her enspirited body, drained of its energy and “sinking down” under the pressures of the demands of a very public hospitality, rebelling against the wifely role, and, more specifically the obligation of ministering to the needs of ministers?³³ In a sense, this is Chauncy's reading of the “doctrine of inward feelings” associated with the Awakening: that it is nothing more than an expression of disorderliness and therefore rebellion that he finds so distasteful but that present-day historians might champion.

This is only a partial reading of Sarah Edwards's“Narrative,” however, for by her own testimony, what moves her so much as to lose her bodily strength—or alternatively, to leap up—is not an antisocial, anarchic antinomianism, but a most intense vision of congregational unity. The sight of so many people at the house fills her, she says, with “an intense desire that we might all arise, and, with an active, flowing, and fervent heart, give glory to God” (Dwight, 176). In this light, her habit of defining her self-abegnation in terms of social ostracism is merely another way of expressing the centrality of the corporate. Whether positively or negatively, shared enspiritedness looms largest in defining Sarah Edwards's spirituality. All her daylight experiences during those two days are characterized by a heightened sense of corporate enspiritedness. Often that sense of incorporation into the larger body is expressed through the experience of conversation. Even as she lay in bed between twelve and four on that Thursday, she was not alone, but “converse[d] very earnestly, with one or another of the pious women, who were present” (Dwight, 178). Likewise, she reports being exceedingly moved by a sight—either real or visionary—of a group of saints. Even before her peak experience of the motes, she says, “especially was I, while I remained in the meeting-house, from time to time overcome, and my strength taken away, by the sight of one and another, whom I regarded as the children of God” (Dwight, 176).³⁴ It is important that this passage has the same intensity of language that she uses for her private experiences and that while the image of the motes suggests a bridging of separation, a breaking down of boundaries and an achievement of oneness, this passage enacts all those ideas on the communal level.

Indeed, even that night's private vision of motes in the sunbeam doesn't remain only in her bedchamber but “continued during the morning” (Dwight, 179) and indeed beyond, into a communal context. All that following day, in fact, Sarah has numerous experiences of a heightened sense of corporate identity, in which the social implications of that private vision are worked out, in a theology of church. All day long, she says, “I could not refrain from conversing with those around me” (Dwight, 180). She begins the day with an exchange with a Mr. Sheldon, that incorporates the light metaphor that had been so central to her nighttime experience, and distantly echoes the Magnificat, Mary's testimony to Elizabeth of her angelic visitation: “That Sun has not set upon my soul all this night; I have dwelt on high in the heavenly mansions; the light of divine love has surrounded me; my soul has been lost in God, and has almost left the body” (Dwight, 179). Later in the day, someone reads from Watts's Penitential Cries the hymn that begins with Mary's words, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” sending Sarah into “transports of joy.” The transmuting of the theme of Sarah's vision through her own words of testimony to Mr. Sheldon, and finally into the hymn is important, for the hymn, while apparently read aloud, is intended for congregational singing and is a focus for congregational worship. What begins as a private insight thus moves outward from the enspirited self to become a corporate statement, a corporate experience.

Indeed, soon after the reading of this hymn, the people who have assembled at the Edwards house go to a service, during which the experience of congregational worship is made concrete. There are sermons by the visiting Mr. Williams and Mr. Buell, Sarah tells us; but although she comments appreciatively about both clerical performances, it is the congregational experience that she finds more important. In the style of a Quaker meeting, the most significant spiritual experience she reports occurs between the two sermons, when apparently no minister is even present in the church: after the first sermon, “the congregation waited while Mr. Buell went home, to prepare to give them a Lecture. It was almost dark before he came, and in the mean time, I conversed in a very earnest and joyful manner, with those who were with me in the pew” (Dwight, 181). This detail of the workings of the Spirit in Northampton is consistent with an important Awakening theme, that the experience and testimony of regenerate lay people overshadows the teaching function of the credentialed ministry. Equally important to Sarah's report of the lay experience, however, is the phenomenon of laypersons not becoming individually elevated and authoritative, but sitting together in the pew in a conversational exchange. It is not only, then, that Sarah has a strong sense during this day of wanting to share her spiritual insights with others in a conversational way or through an act of corporate worship. The important theological insight of her experience and of her “Narrative” is precisely the spiritual centrality of congregational unity and enspiritedness.

Her description of this corporate spirituality merits just as lengthy a quotation as her description of her more private mystical experience. The embodied spirituality that had been so prominent in that private vision remains in force in this passage, which also supplies an articulated theology of that vision of motes in the sunbeam.

As I sat there, I had a most affecting sense of the mighty power of Christ, which had been exerted in what he had done for my soul, and in sustaining and keeping down the native corruptions of my heart, and of the glorious and wonderful grace of God in causing the ark to return to Northampton. So intense were my feelings, when speaking of these things, that I could not forbear rising up and leaping with joy and exultation. I felt at the same time an exceedingly strong and tender affection for the children of God, and realized, in a manner exceedingly sweet and ravishing, the meaning of Christ's prayer, in John xvii.21. “That they all may be one, as thou Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.” This union appeared to me an inconceivable, excellent and sweet oneness; and at the same time I felt that oneness in my soul, with the children of God who were present.

(Dwight, 180)

The theological insight that Sarah takes at this moment from the text of John's gospel is that the union expressed between the Father and the Son, that is, in a binary relationship of the two parts of the godhead, becomes, in Christ's prayer, a broader union, figured, perhaps, by that union of Father and Son but going out in many more directions and entailing many more people. What she understands is that a binary relationship of union can be enlarged into a multifaceted, corporate vision of union. So important is the text from John that Sarah returns to it that evening in her private reading. This passage, “Christ's dying discourse with his disciples, and his prayer with them,” is an interesting choice for her. The “dying discourse” is the words of Jesus to the apostles at the Last Supper, when he instituted the ritual of communion. It is the moment, that is, when Church begins. In addition, the “dying discourse” includes not only the prayer for union (of which the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, so soon to become newly controversial in Northampton, is a sign) but also Jesus's promise that the Comforter, or Holy Spirit, will be with the disciples after his own imminent death. It is the moment in Johannine theology, that is, of a shift in focus from Christology to pneumatology, from incarnational revelation to Church. The promise that the Spirit will abide is a promise that the Church will abide, that the people will be enspirited. Jonathan, in his summary in Some Thoughts, would note that “only mentioning the word, ‘the Comforter,’ [would] immediately take away all [the person's] strength.”³⁵ Sarah's own “Narrative” gives ample testimony to the importance of this term, and therefore, I would argue, of the centrality of Church in her experience. The “transports” that Sarah had felt earlier in the day when the hymn had been read were induced by this idea of the “joyful presence of the Holy Spirit”—the Comforter—for the hymn beginning with the words of the Magnificat ends this way:

My sighs at length are turn'd to songs,
The Comforter is come.

Even several days later, she uses that Johannine vocabulary to express the spiritual sense of the nearness of God, so integral to her whole “Narrative”: “So great and holy a God was so remarkably present. … [T]hese words, in the Penitential Cries—‘The Comforter is Come!’—were accompanied to my soul with such conscious certainty … that I was falling to the floor” (Dwight, 184).

Sarah's spiritual experience, so thoroughly permeated with the theme of the corporate union, as constitutive of it, is repeated that Friday night in her bedroom, when she has a continuation of the spectacular vision she had had the previous evening, using much the same language. “I had an idea of a shining way, or path of light, between heaven and my soul, somewhat as on Thursday night, except that God seemed nearer to me, and as it were close by, and the way seemed more open, and the communication more immediate and more free” (Dwight, 181). She uses similar language to describe her feeling a few days later: “The road between heaven and my soul seemed open and wide” (Dwight, 183).

Significantly, on that Friday night as she meditates on the Johannine passage, she has another insight: “It seemed to me infinitely better to die to go to Christ, yet I felt an entire willingness to continue in this world as long as God pleased” (Dwight, 181). That is, she expresses the conviction that intimacy with God is possible not only on a one-to-one basis (dying to go to Christ) but on earth in community. Indeed, she had felt while in the congregational meeting that afternoon that “it appeared to me that he was going to set up a Reign of Love on the earth and that heaven and earth were, as it were, coming together” (Dwight, 181). Although she continues to test herself with the question of whether she can accept ostracism and bodily torments, and finds herself “made willing to die on the rack or at the stake” (Dwight, 182) or “surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and cruelty upon me” (Dwight, 183), her ties to the texture of earthly relationships, even if they cause suffering, are integral to her spiritual being. For better or worse, she is implicated in community, not alienated from it.

She even feels “in an unusual, and very lively manner, how great a part of Christianity lies in the performance of our social and relative duties to one another” (Dwight, 183). In Some Thoughts, Jonathan Edwards quotes her approvingly, hoping no doubt to answer critics like Chauncy who associated such experiences with a descent into anarchy. Sarah's own “Narrative,” though, gives consistent emphasis to this idea of corporate harmony, expressed through the “relative duties” she fulfills, through conversation, and in almost a liturgical way, through singing.³⁶ Jonathan reports on these “symptoms” as more vocally exhibiting “A great delight in singing praises to God and Jesus Christ, and longing that this present life may be, as it were, one continued song of praise to God; longing, as the person expressed it, to sit and sing this life away; and an overcoming pleasure in the thoughts of spending an eternity in that exercise.”³⁷ Appropriately enough, Dwight's printing of Sarah's “Narrative” closes with a hymn. When a roomful of people has gathered at the Edwards house, Sarah has another vision of unity, prompting her—in an unusually dramatic sign of social levelling—to think “I should rejoice to follow the negro servants in the town to heaven.”

After this, they sang an hymn, which greatly moved me, especially the latter part of it, which speaks of the ungratefulness of not having the praises of Christ always in our tongues. Those last words of the hymn seemed to fasten on my mind, and as I repeated them over, I felt such intense love to Christ, and so much delight in praising him, I could hardly forbear leaping from my chair, and singing aloud for joy and exultation. I continued thus extraordinarily moved until about one o'clock, when the people went away.”

(Dwight, 185-86)

Whatever tensions existed in Northampton, Sarah Edwards's report of spiritual experience, in which boundaries between herself and God are overcome as “motes swimming in the beam of the sun,” thus issues not only in an indifference to the world, a dwelling above it, but also in a “lively sense” of an incorporation into a congregational identity that loses the boundaries or sense of separateness. However spectacular her private experience is, however regenerating it is, it also produces a sense of community. And however strange her behavior might seem, it is consistent with a textured sense of community, not “otherworldliness.”

It is instructive that this emphasis, this connection between individual spiritual experience of merging with God and a congregational experience of wholeness is largely absent from Jonathan Edwards's own personal narrative. To be sure, in other works he characteristically pushed his analysis of spiritual psychology in the direction of the social. In his Faithful Narrative, which described the revivals at Northampton in the 1730s, he noted that the people of Northampton, as they went through their individual spiritual experiences of regenerating grace, achieved a harmony of discourse, making up with each other over earlier wrongs. His ambitious project The History of the Work of Redemption argues that revivals taking place in various parts of the world are part of redemption history, a world-historical phenomenon that is larger than the saving of any one individual, and might issue in a new kind of history. And of course, he concluded his Religious Affections, the 1746 work in which he codified the observations he had made over the previous ten years of the ways the Spirit works on human beings, with the climactic, Twelfth Sign: the work of the Spirit is often visible in good works in the world, and has, therefore, a social component.³⁸

But in the “Personal Narrative” itself, he does not develop this idea. He cherishes, for example, his friendship with Mr. John Smith in New York, and keenly feels the loss of his company when they must part. But his consolation comes only from imagining heavenly reunion, not, as for Sarah, from joy in the experience of union now. “It was sweet to me to think of meeting dear Christians in heaven, where we should never part more” (JER, 289). Lying ill for three months in Windsor, he notes of his caretakers not the “relative duties” that they fulfill, which Sarah realizes is an important component of spirituality, but only that they look longingly out the window, which he takes to be an emblem of waiting for God. And, when the narrative moves to a description of his life at Northampton, he focuses on his being infinitely sinful, employing much of the binary language we saw earlier. Throughout the narrative, that is, Jonathan focuses on private experiences of his relationship with a distant God—in the fields, in his chamber. It is appropriate to his style of spirituality that the metaphor for community that he develops in the “Personal Narrative” is a loosely organized collection of little white flowers, each of which separately receives the rays of the sun. Such a collection might be a source of beauty, “diffusing a sweet fragrance around,” but it lacks the kind of textured congregational identity to which Sarah's “Narrative” testifies. These two narratives, though they share so many features of theology and imagery, represent contrasting spiritual styles, and that Sarah's imagery makes it possible for her to develop a language for the experience of corporate spirituality, or communitas, that was so much a part of the revival experience. Jonathan Edwards's use of her personal experience in Some Thoughts, represents a significant expansion of his theological vocabulary; but he did not excerpt the communal sections to make the connection between her vision of God and her vision of a united community.

It is true that in the latter part of Edwards's career, having been dismissed from the Northampton pulpit, he devoted himself less to an articulation of the possibilities for the coming of the Spirit in a whole community, and more with more abstractly reasoned theology. The great theological treatises for which he became known—The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, The Nature of True Virtue, Freedom of the Will—were written during his stay at Stockbridge, where his primary (and apparently for him, not very taxing) responsibility was ministering to an Indian church. Although he continued to articulate a remarkably consistent Calvinist theology, this latter decade of his career was marked by a retreat from pastoral involvement, never the most comfortable role for him, into his study.

However, in one of his last treatises, Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, he returns to an idea he had come across before in the most eventful days of the Awakening. In the passage perhaps most frequently excerpted from that treatise, he writes:

The great and last end of God's works … is indeed but one; and this one end is most properly and comprehensively called, THE GLORY OF GOD … and is fitly compared to an effulgence or emanation of light from a luminary. … Light is the external expression, exhibition and manifestation of the excellency of the luminary, of the sun for instance: it is the abundant, extensive emanation and communication of the fulness of the sun to innumerable beings that partake of it. … The emanation or communication of the divine fulness, consisting in the knowledge of God, love to him, and joy in him, has relation indeed both to God and to the creature, but it has relation to God as its fountain, as the thing communicated, is something of his internal fulness. The water in the stream is something of the fountain; and the beams of the sun are something of the sun. And again they have relation to God as their object; for the knowledge communicated is the knowledge of God; and the love communicated, is the love of God; and the happiness communicated, is joy in God. In the creature's knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, and the love communicated, is joy in God. The glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; his fulness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God, and he is the beginning, and the middle, and the end.³⁹

William Scheick has written of the Dissertation as a whole, that it represents a change in theology for Jonathan Edwards, “succeed[ing] in bridging the gap between man and God” that was so evident in his earlier works.⁴⁰ This change is most dramatically shown in this passage, where the image of the sunbeams reaching the creature and then being reflected back, has more in common with Sarah Edwards's narrative of spiritual experience than with his own. She had written “flowing and reflowing”; he writes “emanation and remanation.” In both cases, the theology implies a God who is at least partially reconstructed by the regenerate creature's own remanation. In other words, in some way the creature becomes part of God, much as the motes climb up the sunbeam to God in Sarah Edwards's passage. Not only is the rhetoric more fluid, as Scheick observes, but the theology itself is less dualistic, less dependent on oppositions, striving for a vision of union with God. Jonathan's imagery then echoes Sarah's conception of an intimate relationship with God, one that ameliorates the abyss that had been so prominent in his “Personal Narrative,” achieving intimacy by dissolving the boundaries between Creator and creature.⁴¹

Was this Sarah's mark on the Edwards corpus? Ten years earlier, in Some Thoughts, Jonathan had quoted her freely, knowing, though, that her idiom was different from his own. Here, he incorporates her conception into his own language, yearning for her “open road with God,” and qualifying the severe binarism of his earlier works. The Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World is a fitting endpoint, then, of a two-way marital and pastoral conversation, in which lay testimony—and its variations in figuration and indeed theology—has worked its way into a treatise by a giant in American theology.

Notes

1. For basic and helpful treatments of the Great Awakening, see Edwin Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York, 1957); C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); and Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Some recent work has made us aware of the constructedness of the very phenomenon known as the Great Awakening. See Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” Journal of American History 69 (1982): 305-25; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Joseph Conforti, “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795-1842,” EAL 26 (1991): 99-118.

2. Sereno Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830), pp. 178-79. All subsequent citations of Sarah Edwards's narrative will be identified within the text.

3. See, for example, Isaac Watts's 14 September 1743 letter to Benjamin Colman, quoted in C. C. Goen, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4: The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 70.

4. Sereno Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (1949; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Patricia Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980).

5. Julie Ellison, “The Sociology of ‘Holy Indifference’: Sarah Edwards' Narrative,” American Literature 56 (1984): 479-95; Sandra Gustafson, “Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘Feminine’ Speech,” American Literary History 6 (1994): 185-212.

6. Ruth Bloch, “Women, Love, and Virtue in the Thought of Edwards and Franklin,” in Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture, ed. Barbara B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 140.

7. Dr. Samuel Mather's note is on the back of sermon notes, Box 8, No. 567, Beinecke MS collection. On interruption of the birth cycle, Patricia Bonomi's research is cited in Bloch, p. 140.

8. Miscellanies, in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 38.

9. Harry S. Stout and Peter Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London,” The Journal of American History 71 (1983): 556-78.

10. See David Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), for a discussion of the traditions of the Puritan ministry; see Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itineracy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994) for a discussion of the implications of itineracy.

11. This is Ruth Bloch's argument.

12. See, for example, Ellison, “The Sociology of ‘Holy Indifference’.”

13. Letter to Thomas Gillespie, 1 July 1751, in C. C. Goen, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4: The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 564.

14. Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, in C. C. Goen, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4: The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 294.

15. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), for a discussion of the traditions of biography to which the Magnalia belongs; see also Wayne Proudfoot, “From Theology to a Science of Religions: Jonathan Edwards and William James on Religious Affections,” Harvard Theological Review 82 (1989): 149-65.

16. Some Thoughts, in Works, 4:332-33.

17. Charles Chauncy, A Letter from a Gentleman in Boston, to Mr. George Wishart, One of the Ministers of Edinburgh, Concerning the State of Religion in New-England (Edinburgh, 1745). Rpt. in Richard L. Bushman, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740-1743 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 118.

18. The most well-known critique of the Awakening is Chauncy's Seasonable Thought on the Revivals (Boston, 1743), which was written to answer Edwards's Some Thoughts. See Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 72-106. See also Cedric B. Cowing, “Sex and Preaching in the Great Awakening,” AQ 20 (1968): 624-44; and Harry S. Stout and Peter Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London,” Journal of American Literature 71 (1983): 556-78.

19. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970; New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), p. xxiii.

20. Douglas, pp. 64-81.

21. The important point here is that both Sarah Edwards and Charles Chauncy live in the same society but perceive that society's degree of structuring differently. Again, Douglas's words are helpful in explaining how this disparity may reflect gender and class differences. “The social division of labour involves women less deeply than their menfolk in the central institutions—political, legal, administrative, etc.—of their society. They are indeed subject to control. But the range of controls they experience is simpler, less varied. Mediated through fewer human contacts, their social responsibilities are more confined to the domestic range … the web of their social life, though it may tie them down effectively enough, is of a looser texture” (Douglas, p. 84).

22. Some Thoughts, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, 4:341.

23. In describing the 1735 revival in A Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions, for example, he had written, “Our converts then remarkably appeared united in dear affection to one another, and many have expressed much of that spirit of love which they felt toward all mankind; and particularly to those that had been least friendly to them. Never, I believe, was so much done in confessing injuries, and making up differences as the last year” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 4:184).

24. “Personal Narrative,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 283. Subsequent citations of Jonathan Edwards's “Personal Narrative” will be identified within the text with “JER” and a page number.

25. Roland André Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay on Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

26. Some Thoughts, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, 4:332.

27. Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelicalism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), p. 43; Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 72.

28. Tracy, p. 157.

29. Kenneth Shipton, “The New England Clergy of the Glacial Age” (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications 32 [1937]: 24-54); James W. Schmotter, “Ministerial Careers in Eighteenth-Century New England: The Social Context, 1700-1760,” Journal of Social History 9 (1975-76).

30. See Miller, Jonathan Edwards, and Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor.

31. Julie Ellison, “The Sociology of ‘Holy Indifference’: Sarah Edwards's Narrative,” American Literature 56 (1984): 479-95, highlights this aspect of the narrative.

32. Some Thoughts, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 4:337.

33. Sandra Gustafson, “Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘Feminine’ Speech,” American Literary History 6 (1994):185-212, makes this suggestion. Recall Douglas's observation, though, that religious insights are not compensations for a lack of cultural power but rather positive explanations of the subject's world model.

34. Ellison also stresses the public nature of Sarah Edwards's experiences, to say that it “has the character of a performance given by her for the people” (486). Although Ellison does not discuss Sarah's ‘motes in the sunbeam’ image, her comment, “The whole distinction between inner and outer, private and social, breaks down in her case” (417) is quite consistent with my analysis here.

35. Some Thoughts, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 4:337.

36. See Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London,” p. 567, for a much more disorderly example of singing among New Light adherents; and see chapter 2, above, for a discussion of the connection between congregational singing and specifically lay piety.

37. Some Thoughts, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 4:337-38.

38. The Edwards literature is, of course, vast. But see Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); Harry S. Stout, “The Puritans and Edwards,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Gerald R. McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

39. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

40. William J. Scheick, The Writings of Jonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1975), p. 137.

41. Janice Knight, “Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature,” WMQ 48 (1991): 531-51, demonstrates the centrality of such emanation or refulgence to Edwards's theology, as illustrated particularly in Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World.