[In the following essay, Shea argues that Jonathan Edwards's theological defense of the first Great Awakening was dependent upon his wife's descriptions of her religious experience.]

I

Ritual printing in college anthologies of Jonathan Edwards' gripping sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” exhausted religious interest in him for the past century.¹ In an unusual compliment to the literary power of this Calvinist, even Catholics read it, perhaps because he said so well what they already believed. But now no one seems to believe it any longer, and college students these days know little more of him than they do of hell or the angry God.

Edwards contributed to the first Great Awakening of 1740. He was one of its chief preachers, and he defended and explained it as its chief theologian. While he worked to renew and transform his Puritan tradition in the light of this startling pentecostal outbreak, the very currents of that tradition proved too powerful and antipathetic to be contained. The new Edwardsian skin could not hold the old wine. His constructive theology, like that of Aquinas, was an intellectual success but a political failure, for it was not able to keep the pietist and rationalist strains of the American Calvinist tradition bound together … no small failure, it should be remarked, since there seemed at the time no other intellectual and spiritual foundation for a common American life. On one side, the enthusiasts of rebirth were wary of Edwards. They wanted only to be enthusiasts, and that required precious little theology; after all, the proof of the pudding and especially the pudding of the second birth is in the eating, and they had eaten their meal. On the other side, the starchy Boston moralists, heading none too slowly toward the reasonable Christianity to be called Unitarianism a century later, would have none of Edwards' talk about religious affections since they all knew that emotion and feeling was to be controlled and not lived by.²

Edwards' mediating position did not die with him in 1758. The best American theologians of the late 18th century had lived and studied with him in his Northampton parsonage, including his son Jonathan, Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and Timothy Dwight.³ But it died with his disciples. Different parts of his legacy were taken up by three mid-19th century evangelical theologians, Taylor at Yale, Bushnell in Hartford, and Hodge at Princeton; but the patrimony was by then distorted, and Edwards' influence on the wane.⁴ By the end of the 19th century, he had suffered in the general rejection of Puritanism and was remembered mainly for his constant preaching of what few educated persons could any longer believe. Royce at Harvard was his intellectual equal as a philosopher and surely cherished Christian values, but, as was the case commonly with idealists, he didn't believe any of the Christian stories.⁵ James and Dewey, in their praxis theories of knowing, were his heirs, but they had turned against orthodox Christianity.⁶ Edwards would not have recognized American liberal Protestants as his offspring, and surely would have found early 20th century fundamentalism to be without both gracious affection and brains. If he did not easily fit his own times, he would have been yet more at odds in 1900.

Today, when scholars look back on his time with sympathy for his position and great admiration for his gifts, they still question his goals and his methods. For Peter Gay, Edwards is “pathetic,” an American tragedy, the inevitable outcome of clinging to a myth in times which passed it by. In an age when the first great question of our modern period on the meaning of history were being raised, Edwards remained an unrepentant historical providentialist and millenarian. In Gay's view, Edwards was “the last medieval American at least among the intellectuals.”⁷ Ola Winslow, who wrote a congenial and highly intelligent biography of Edwards some forty years ago, pictured Edwards the theologian as a man bound by the world view of his fathers and asking of it no serious or critical questions; for Edwards, the large answers were already in and merely needed explanation, defense, and occasional rearrangement.⁸ In a century in which Europe became enlightened, Edwards remained in the undisturbed darkness of traditionalism.

One might respond to Gay and to other critics of Edwards that they do not understand God, the salvation of the soul, the incredible power of language to survive, nor the task of theology. The people who grumble at Edwards are the children of the Enlightenment, birds not well perched to hear the songs of God. For them, and for many of our contemporaries and colleagues, “providence” and “conversion” and “Holy Spirit” trip off an alien tongue, and are as much a muddle and an offense as Papal infallibility, celibacy, and the jihad.⁹

So powerful a mind and spirit was this “pathetic” figure that he not only bestrode his own times, but left a heritage in American thought that turns up in unlikely places. The most unorthodox, and so unlikely, of Edwards' successors carried his germ, from the arch-heretic Emerson in his theory of language and nature to the liberal evangelical Bushnell after him. Hawthorne's novels do not conceal their debt to Edwards. One finds echoes of Edwards in Santayana's aesthetics and his ethical existentialism. Even William James, who had very little use for ordinary Christianity and its small joys, relied heavily on Edwards for his understanding of conversion. Edwards remained a looming presence in our American intellectual tradition, even though the theologians looked elsewhere for inspiration.¹⁰

There has been a remarkable return to Jonathan Edwards in the past several decades. A significant body of books and essays of the highest quality have piled up around the spine of a new edition of his works from Yale University Press.¹¹ Why? Why has the pathetic Edwards become the center of the attentions of theologians, philosophers, historians, and students of American culture? John E. Smith, the editor of the Yale edition of the Treatise on Religious Affections, remarks that we are forced back to Edwards by the peculiar complexion of our own times: we need to understand religious experience, we need to be able to connect religious meaning with individual experience, and we need to find out how religious experience can be both genuine and critical.¹² In other words, the contemporary religious phenomenon includes a revival to be judged, spirit to be discerned, conversion to be understood and critically appropriated. With not a single one of these questions can contemporary scientific rationalism or liberal theology help us. In fact, if anything should now be clear to us, it is that the Enlightenment and its heirs have proved incapable of understanding and valuing the fact that a human being loves God above all things. Science, and the philosophies it has called forth, and even more ancient and admirable cords in the intellectualist symphony of the West have done us some large scale injury.¹³ Edwards, like other great figures of our religious tradition, provides us with at least a starting point for questions and perhaps an occasional answer. We recall Edwards and his kind because we need to recover our story, to find out how to tell it again with intelligence and conviction, and to understand what the story does for us and how it does it. We can learn how to tell the story from his sermons, and a good deal about how the story works from his religious anthropology.

But there is still another reason for a return. Edwards was a theologian who spoke about God—in these days a rare phenomenon. For me the most startling thing about Edwards is not that he talks about hell; it is that he talks about God as if he knows God. Theologians must do a lot of thinking about God but one has the impression that they do not know God very well. Charitably put, we seem these days to be acutely sensitive to the limits of speech about God. Edwards knew a lot about God. I know that puts the matter simplistically and with uncritical naivete, but that is what comes across on page after page of sermon and treatise: a patient, clear, intellectually profound, unapologetic, and forceful knowledge of God and God's way with the human heart. Edwards was a man charged with preaching God and guiding souls, things he could not do without knowing God and souls and what goes on between them. Therefore, he was not given to talking through an academic hat. He intended to think rigorously, philosophically, about God and God's ways, and to speak and write clearly and directly about both. Whether this is any longer possible in an age of criticism is a serious issue and should not be slighted, but our need to hear from those who know God will not change. Let me quote my naturalist philosophy teacher, John Randall, on our present need for such a theology:

The religion of the priest, the religion of the prophet, and the religion of the healer have been held together by the theologian, because he has known God. … What is needed is not the priest of a sentimental aestheticism, nor the prophet of an unimaginative social reform, nor the preacher of a popular uplift, nor even the professor of religion, but the theologian. And not the desperate apologist, seeking at all costs to prove that God exists, but the theologian, who really knows God and can make it clear to us what he is.¹⁴

I am deeply affected by Edwards, by his work and his story, by his heart and mind. I confess from the outset my prejudices in his favor. Even if I do not believe much of what he believed, I cannot help but conclude that he is right about religious experience and grace and the knowledge of God. Frankly, the effect he has on me astounds me, for the doctrinal imagination of Christianity, its evangelical dimensions, and its preoccupation with salvation in the form of eternal life throw me into confusion, and these course through his spiritual veins. While I, too, am pressed as was Edwards to find the “glory of God, His beauty and excellency and majesty” in nature and history, I largely fail to find them. The images which ring for him do not ring for me: for me, the images which ring are closer to the lower register of his imagination; the cross, the Holocaust, the dead body of my father, the vast, frozen silence of space. While I do not know what to do with Edwards' eternity nor with his millennial speculation except to demythologize them, I think he is correct that religion is a matter of conversion; that one can understand only if one possesses a “new sense” imparted by the Holy Spirit; that the glory of God is a spectre to the mind blinded by philosophical and theological rationalism; that religious and theological knowledge rests on faith, and faith, in its turn, rests on love. Edwards rises above his century and his peculiar brand of Christianity, as all classics do.¹⁵

II

The text we approach here is not only the printed page; it is a life lived. Edwards' work is a classic, whether major or minor, but so also is his life. The first can be read without the second, but I doubt it can be fully appreciated without it. In fact, I do not think that the first would be what it is had the second been considerably different. The lesson does not come easily to us (it certainly has not come easily to me!) that a theology is a reflection of a life and is, at its best, a reflection on a life lived, an “experience” and a “situation” as John Dewey might say. Before I turn to Edwards, then, I wish to state and explain a hermeneutical disposition which has in part been forced upon me by my puzzling over Edwards' written words: the meaning of the text is indeed “in front” of the text, but the text's world is “behind” it and is crucial to the understanding of the text. A text is different from a life but it belongs to a life.

I believe that imagination is political, an instrument by which one is related to the world of human meaning and action. Imagination, in the classical view, renders the absent and the past present, and it is our first step toward the existence of the nonexistent by its vision of the possible and the ideal. Imagination is the cradle of action.¹⁶ There is no human activity which is not imaginative and, because we inhabit a universal polis bounded by the divine, none that is apolitical. Let me give three examples: theology, religious experience, and sex.

Theology is imaginative and political. This is a commonplace, or it should be. Theology, as a reflective discipline, views what appears in human experience, but it speaks especially of what does not appear and what cannot appear. What does not and cannot appear in the manifold of human experience is the intelligible unity of that manifold. Theological imagination, at its best, tells us what in human experience that unity is “like.”¹⁷ Theology is also political, sometimes in obvious ways. Hans Kung, for example, is this century's ablest Catholic practitioner of evangelical reformist politics: gospel values hold his heart, and his teeth are sunk in Rome's heel.¹⁸

To take another and less obvious case: David Tracy's theological work goes on under modern liberal Christian and Enlightenment political ideals. No doubt, he is a radical in a traditionalist church; no doubt, he is an oddity in an unbelieving academy. One wonders where he belongs. But Tracy's work exhibits a controlling commitment to systematic understanding and to reason that goes back well beyond the Enlightenment. His work proceeds on deep-seated convictions about what human being ought to be, even if it is not that yet; and on convictions about the instrument by which human being can become what it is not yet, namely, dialogue.¹⁹ That conviction about the ideal form of the human community and dialogue as its instrument gives the imaginative shape and moral substance to his books and essays. The “world” in which he lives and writes is not the political world of ecclesiastical theologians; it is a world-community of inquiry in which Tracy already participates. That is a political vision, and consequently Tracy's theology is political even if he never gets to his book on practical theology.

So also Edwards' theology is political: it embodies an ecclesiology and a vision of what Christianity must become if it is to survive and prosper in a new world of experience. It was shaped against the background of the death of Puritan culture and the birth of a new culture and nation and against those twin beasts rising up from the 18th century sea, European rationalism and American greed. These two could only be parasites on a genuine human community and never its foundation. His theological vision was widely rejected because few people wanted to live as Edwards did—few ever have! But there is no doubt in my mind that anyone who accepts a theological vision such as Edwards' will act as they had not acted before, and that is the new politics entailed in his “new sense” of God. Edwards had a theological vision, the vision called forth a politics, and the politics destroyed his pastorate in Northampton.

Secondly, prayer and preaching are imaginative and political, populated with beliefs and images of what the universe of being is and should be. Prayer supposes a story, even when it reaches for the immediacy and imageless experience of the mystic, and homily tells the story straight out. Of course the story may be true or not, adequate or not, better than another or not (these problems are inherent in any politics), but the story, the images, provide us with a city of meaning and action. The desert Father did not go off into the sands because he was unconcerned with the world, nor the nun to her cell, nor my parents to mass on Sunday. We cry out in pain to God because our existence hurts, and that existence, that pain, and that prayer are political. The imagined universes and the lives of Francis of Assisi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Dorothy Day were political; all of them involved and embodied convictions about the meaning and value of human life and how it ought to be lived. But it is not just the prophets who are the politicians of the spirit—even the wisdom writers are, as are the priests. In liturgy and prayer we dream the meaning of the world, and that dream itself is political. I am saying that the religious life of every sort implies a political life of some sort.

Thus, the Book of Revelation, in all its parts even to the hymns sung before the throne of glory, is a political document and not a denatured religious burble: the Book dreams this world in the image of the other world. Feuerbach was not far off on this, and Marx was closer yet. No less is the work of Jonathan Edwards political. He addresses himself frequently to the realities of the other world, but that imaging takes up into itself his understandings of this world and the meaning of the other for it. He was not rejected by his congregation because he dwelt in the other world, but because his speaking of it and acting in this world for it had for long cut too close to Northampton's bone. The homily and the tract had a political foreground as well as background.

Finally, sex is political and, God knows, it is imaginative. Sex, even imagined, is interpersonal, social, traditional, contextual. To act sexually in whatever way is to make a profoundly political choice with roots in one's past, vines in one's cultural surroundings, and tendrils in one's future. The purposes and goals of sexual behavior have political implications and conditions. We are told that the rapist's sexual imagination is political, that rape is a political act of vengeance on the world in which he lives. Sexual imagination is tied to the world in which one lives and the world one would live in. Take, for example, the celibate; the choice of celibacy, no less than the choice to marry, is fraught with politics. What kind of communion will you have with God and your fellows? What kind of world do you want this world to become? These are the unspoken questions in every sexual adventure of human life. They seem to me palpably present in the life, religious vision, and theology of Edwards.

My claim, if not established, should at least be clear. Human being is political being, unavoidably; meaning is political meaning; and the images and acts of imagination which run through our communal and individual history are political, at least in context and implication. Theology, prayer, sex are all as political as they are imaginative. But, as I hope we would at least allow if not agree, theology, prayer, and sexual love are born of conversion. Conversion is a change in ideal, in conviction, and in feeling that at its heart has to do with imagining what one's life and the life of the human community ought to be.²⁰

Jonathan Edwards was a converted man who thought like one, a man in love with God and nature and the church, and a man in love with Sarah Pierpont. The background of his theology is pluriform: the Scriptures, the Fathers, the reformers, the Puritan divines, his grandfather's preaching and writing. But he repeated none of them, he transmuted them for his Northampton and his New England, that is, his theology had a political background and aim. His prayers, his visions of heaven and hell reflected his critical assessment of the society around him, of the economic and political life of his people, and they reflected as well his wishes for that polity. I would like here to follow out one thread of this complex, the politics of his relationship with Sarah, his wife, for this reason: his religious life, his pastorate in Northampton, his theology, his ecclesiology, his goals for the New England saints, were shaped by his love for Sarah and hers for him, by their understanding of each other, and by their common love for their eleven children. It seems to me that Edwards' vision of religious life was every bit as much shaped by his family experience as that family experience was shaped by his religious vision. In fact, I think he viewed the human community as a family. What kind of world did he want it to be? He did not answer that alone; she answered it with him. He wanted the world to be holy, and he learned as much about holiness from Sarah Pierpont as he did from Calvin.²¹

III

Edwards was born of New England clergy stock in 1703. His father, Timothy Edwards, was for sixty years pastor of the New Windsor, Connecticut parish. His maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts; at his peak of intellect and influence, Stoddard was easily the equal of the more famous Boston Mathers whom he regularly disconcerted with his untraditional views.²² His daughters married young ministers in the Connecticut Valley, one of them Jonathan's father, Timothy Edwards. Stoddard's influence followed his seed; he was called “Pope of the Connecticut Valley,” a title not without its ambiguity in Puritan New England.

Sarah Pierpont's father was a leading figure in the founding of Yale College in 1701.²³ Edwards was sent to Yale, since Harvard even then was too liberal for orthodox Puritans. Between ages thirteen and twenty he studied in the town where Sarah was passing through childhood. In 1722 Jonathan was graduated and spent the following year pastoring a New York City flock. In 1724 he was back in New Haven as tutor to Yale College students, during the years when the girl was becoming a woman. In 1726 he joined his grandfather's ministry in Northampton, and in 1727 brought his seventeen year old bride to her new home.

Through the next twenty-five years, once Solomon passed to glory (1729), the Edwards dominated Northampton spiritually. There had been several “waterings” or “periods of refreshment” in Stoddard's time, but in 1735 the town experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit under Jonathan's preaching that spread rapidly down the Connecticut Valley. Edwards soon afterwards wrote the book that made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic and let every aspiring evangelical preacher know just what an awakening is and how one takes place. He called it A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls In Northamption.²⁴ In 1739 he wrote an account of his own religious experience.²⁵ From 1740 to 1742 the Great Awakening occurred, and the Spirit shook the colonies with such power that the American people have not yet recovered from it. Edwards wrote and published a series of books on the Awakening that are classics in spiritual theology: The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741); Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742); and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746).²⁶ In 1750 his Northampton church fired him after twenty-five years of what must be called, even at the risk of cliche, faithful and unremitting service. He and Sarah packed up the remaining children and moved to the frontier to care for an Indian mission, and there, in the midst of a dozen white families and a few hundred Indians, he sat down to write four of the outstanding theological works in the American library, one on the foundations of ethics, one in metaphysical theology, one on Christian doctrine, and one on freedom of the will.²⁷ He accepted the presidency of Princeton College eight years later. He died in 1758.

What Edwards knew, he knew from three sources: (a) books, including the scriptures, the spiritual theology of the Puritan divines and the fathers of the church, and the best science and philosophy he could lay his hands on; (b) close observation of spectacular revivals and less spectacular progress in virtue of his neighbors; and (c) his own and his wife's intimate converse with the Holy Spirit. My hunch is that the latter, and especially his wife's spiritual life, is a key element in his spiritual theology. I would support that hunch, and give the reader some taste of both the theology and the relationship, by means of a few texts.

First there is his paean of praise to Sarah, written when he was twenty and she thirteen. Already he was fascinated by her. She underwent the first of her “seasons of grace” when she was six years old and was at thirteen a Puritan saint. God loved her greatly, Jonathan knew, and visited her, provoking her so to long for God that she awaited the divine call from this life with eagerness:

There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love and delight forever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she would offend this Great Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this Great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and she seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her.²⁸

Four years later they were married. Let us banish our perverse Freudian suspicions that the Great Being who was to ravish and delight Sarah was none other than Jonathan himself, and simply take him at his word. Nor are these words that might be uttered by any young Puritan minister about a young woman toward whom his affections led him. Sarah remained a saint, and his words about her did not change.

Edwards' conversion experience occurred while he was a Yale student, but his account of it was written years later. His diary reveals the date of his conviction and consecration to be 1721. Edwards tells us in his “Personal Narrative” that in his youth he had difficulties with double predestination. It seemed to him over his early years a “horrible doctrine.” But then his estimate changed radically, for he now found himself able to say that “the doctrine has very often appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet.” At first he himself did not understand the change:

But I remember the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty of God, and his justice in thus eternally disposing of men, according to his sovereign pleasure. But never could give an account [sic], how, or by what means, I was thus convinced, not in the least imagining at the time, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God's Spirit in it; but only that now I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it. However, my mind rested in it; and it put an end to all those cavils and objections. And there has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, in respect to the doctrine of God's sovereignty, from that day to this; so that I scarce ever found so much as the rising of an objection against it …

The reformation of attitude toward reprobation (one which I have yet fully to join him in) did not stand alone. In fact, it was accompanied by two additional changes, the first basic and the second symptomatic and symbolic. More clearly and profoundly than he had been in his childhood and youth, Edwards was astonished by God's beauty. As a good Calvinist he had always recognized God's transcendent power even if he could not easily abide its negative predestinarian implication. Now his heart was captivated by God's beauty mediated through nature. He might be said to have moved past devotion and conviction to the state of being in love:

After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind.

Finally, the change in heart (Edwards' “new sense” of the glory of God) and the change in attitude toward reprobation are linked in his memory with a loosening of fear:

And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly, nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunder storm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunder storm; and used to take the opportunity, 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 oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. While thus engaged, it always seemed natural to me to sing, or chant for my meditations; or, to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice.²⁹

These transports recurred “several other times” in Edwards' life. The new sense of God's glory did not recede, and reprobation remained beyond objection, rendered reasonable not by reasoning but by being discovered to be a facet of that sovereign beauty which is the primary object of the “new sense.” What was a stumbling block to Edwards in reason becomes grounds for rejoicing in faith. In addition, the thunder which was a threat to the boy is thereafter a joy to the man. Nature and the Calvinist doctrine of reprobation have been transvalued by graced affections, and my serve as example of the connection, later made out by Edwards in his work on the revival, between feeling, image, and doctrine in conversion.³⁰

The diary reflects a long period of melancholy which came to an end not at his conversion but with his marriage to Sarah in 1727. His description of his conversion at seventeen years and his deepening in 1721 was composed in 1739, some eighteen to twenty-two years after the original events, twelve years after his marriage to Sarah, and so after Sarah's several periods of deepening. The language of the description of Edwards' early conversion is quite probably influenced by his wife's own experiences and communications. I suggest this on the basis of Edwards' description of Sarah's 1742 enlightenment in Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival. Without being named there, Sarah is the person who, for Jonathan, is the perfect case for the authenticity of the revival.³¹ He recounts that Sarah had undergone several “wonderful seasons” in 1735, 1739, and 1740. He points out that his wife was converted twenty-seven years before the experience he now describes. She had come from a virtuous and respected family, had all through her young life engaged in the ascetical practices and discipline expected of God's saints, and had fought against sin persistently. In a word, she was a devoted Christian woman and in no sense “enthusiastical.” But now, in her midlife, she was “seized upon” by the Holy Spirit and underwent “transporting views and rapturous affections” without, however, following any lower impulses or making claim to special revelation (these would have put her at once among the number of the enthusiastical in Edwards' view). He goes on to describe the effects on his wife of this last, two week long seizure:

The things already mentioned have been attended also with the following things; viz. an extraordinary sense of the awful majesty and greatness of God, so as often times to take away the bodily strength; a sense of the holiness of God, as of a flame infinitely pure and bright, so as sometimes to overwhelm soul and body; … a sense of the glorious, unsearchable, unerring wisdom of God in his works, both of creation and providence, so as to swallow up the soul, and overcome the strength of the body; a sweet rejoicing of soul at the thoughts of God's being infinitely and unchangeably happy, and an exulting gladness of heart that God is self-sufficient, and infinitely above all dependence, and reigns over all, and does his will with absolute and uncontrollable power and sovereignty; … and a willingness to suffer the hidings of God's face, and to live and die in darkness and horror if God's honor should require it, and to have no other reward for it but that God's name should be glorified, although much of the sweetness of God's countenance had been experienced.

Now if such things are enthusiasm, and the fruits of a disturbed brain, let my brain be evermore possessed of that happy distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the world of mankind may be all seized with this benign, meek, beneficient, beatifical, glorious distraction!³²

There are several things to note. First, in the winter of 1741-42, Edwards returned after a two week absence from his congregation to find the town in an uproar of religious devotion, his wife foremost among the persons affected by the work of a young substitute minister.³³ Edwards immediately had his wife dictate to him the experience of the previous days; he recorded it in his own shorthand, and his account is based on Sarah's words, mingled with his own comments and evaluation.

Second, he used this account in his defense of the Great Awakening then occurring, and put it into print by the end of the year.³⁴ By it he meant to show the critics of the Awakening and the advocates of reasonable religion that the persons “fallen upon” are not enthusiasts but rather persons of substantial spiritual background and of impeccable moral and emotional credentials. To do so, he connects the events of early winter 1742 with Sarah's lifetime of devotion and history of renewal. But the defense is the minor note for us. In the account, Sarah became for Edwards (and, he hoped, for New England) a fulfillment of the old Puritan type of sainthood and an example of his new definition of true religion. In turn, her experience becomes typical of a transformed Puritan experience and understanding. Edwards understood the revival and validated it by drawing on the figure of his wife, and put her before all New England as the model of evangelical spirituality. Whatever else may need to be said of Sarah's experience, we have here evidence that Edwards' extraordinary devotion to and estimate of her led him to find in her the pattern of Christian conversion, as she had surely found it in him. That pattern is worked out in detail four years later in the Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.

Third, the language he used of her, he used of his own progress, including indications of melancholy and exaltation which, for Edwards, amount to a gradual purification of affectivity and a growing “new sense” of God's graciousness.³⁵ The language places their spiritual experience in the tradition of Christian mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, Catherine of Genoa, and the great Teresa.³⁶

Another point of view on the two week seizure is possible, of course, as it would be of the other mystics, namely, that it was a manic state involving compulsive talking, automatisms, fainting, loss of sleep, and perhaps hallucinations. Sarah and Jonathan thought it was religious ecstasy with its normal physical and psychic accompaniments. We may imagine the explanations which might be given by a Freud or a Leuba.³⁷

Fourth, he plunges his wife into the center of the New England debate over the value and meaning of the revival then taking place. This may raise questions about his delicacy and sense of privacy, but it also reveals unequivocally how highly he prized her experience and his conviction that, in these spiritual matters, private good must cede to public good. If it was politically responsible for him to defend the Awakening at risk of his own public standing, then he may have felt it also part of his political responsibility to expose his wife's spiritual journey to the colonies and to England.

Fifth, the people of Northampton knew of whom he spoke. They witnessed her peculiar behavior during his two week absence. Many of them resented her, and their resentment surely deepened when they found her the centerpiece of her husband's defense of the new Puritan sainthood. His use of her experience must have complicated his position in Northampton immeasurably. The towns-people finally did ask: Should a saint spend eleven pounds on a silver watch and chain? Or send regularly to Boston for chocolate? And should her husband insist on wearing a wig, and a very expensive one at that, at a time when the ministerial wig was going out of fashion? And, why did he need the highest ministerial salary of any minister in New England outside Boston? His love of Sarah and his theology of the revival became inextricably involved with the politics of the New England village. The results were still some eight years off.³⁸

In 1755 Edwards, now among the Housatunnock Indians in Stockbridge after being ousted by his flock, essayed on conversion as the foundation of ethics. The Nature of True Virtue is a fine, even lustrous, piece of work, but it has some shortcomings for those interested in ethics. Clyde Holbrook had this to say about the work: “… Edwards has left behind him all ethical discourse. The aesthetic vision of reality has so swallowed up ethical insight that it appears that nothing is left but the poetic and mystical outpourings of a mind which has lost all contact with the hard business of ethical decision wrought out in daily life.”³⁹ Holbrook is correct this far: Edwards was not interested in the rules of behavior. Rather, he was interested in what is called today “metaethics,” or, why we say some behavior is good and what constitutes true virtue. His answer is structurally simple: behavior is virtuous when it occurs in the context of unconditioned love; when it occurs outside that context, it may in some limited sense be good but it is not truly virtuous. He must explain how our limited loves, although genuine, must be placed in an infinite horizon of being if they are to be virtuous loves. One of the last and most telling of his examples for the difference between natural and true virtue is the love of family:

… many times men, from natural gratitude, do really with a sort of benevolence, love those who love them. From this, together with some other natural principles, men may love their near friends, their own party, their country, etc. The natural disposition there is to mutual affection between the sexes, often operates by what may properly be called love. There is oftentimes truly a kind both of benevolence and complacence. Thus these things have something of the general nature of virtue. What they are essentially defective in is, that they are private in their nature; they do not arise from any temper of benevolence to being in general, nor have they a tendency to any such effect in their operation. Yet by agreeing with virtue in its general nature, they are beautiful within their own private sphere, i.e., they appear beautiful if we confine our views to that private system, and while we shut out all other things to which they stand related from our consideration. If that private system contained the sum of universal existence, their benevolence would have true beauty. … The reason why men are so ready to take these private affections for true virtue, is the narrowness of their views; and above all, that they are ready to leave the divine Being out of their view.

… when natural affections have their operations mixed with the influence of virtuous benevolence, and are directed and determined thereby, they may be called virtuous; so there may be a virtuous love of parents to children, and between other near relatives; a virtuous love of our own town, or country, or nation. Yea, and a virtuous love between the sexes, as there may be the influence of virtue mingled with instinct; and virtue may govern with regard to the particular manner of its operation, and may guide it to such ends as are agreeable to the great purposes of true virtue.⁴⁰

Until the last and most powerful of Sarah's awakenings, she had, in her own words, tended to put the “esteem, and love and kind treatment of her husband” even before the divine “peace and calm of mind.” “I found that it seemed to bereave me of the quietness and calm of my mind, in any respect not to have the good opinion of my husband.”⁴¹ It was precisely this barrier to “general benevolence” that was broken by the Holy Spirit in the desolations and transports of the winter of 1742. When Edwards returned he found a woman who belonged no longer to him, but to God alone. It is precisely this “benevolence toward being in general,” or self-transcending of all conditioned contexts in the unconditioned love of God, that Edwards raises up as the ultimate anthropological and metaphysical standard of virtue for every phase and aspect of human life.

IV

In September of 1757 Aaron Burr Sr., Edwards' son-in-law and the president of Princeton College, died. After much hesitation, Edwards accepted the invitation to succeed him. He did so in January of 1758, and arrived at Princeton to find a small pox epidemic threatening. In order to encourage the neighborhood toward “modern means,” he submitted to vaccination. The vaccination killed him. On March 22, through a throat nearly closed by sores, he whispered his last words to his daughter and doctor: “Give my kindest love to my dear wife and tell her that the uncommon union which has so long subsisted between us has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual and therefore will continue forever.”⁴² Sarah received a letter from the doctor reporting Jonathan's death and words. On April 1 she wrote to her daughter, Esther Burr, in New Jersey:

My very dear child, what shall I say! A Holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. O that we may kiss the rod and lay our hands upon our mouths. The Lord has done it. He has made me adore his goodness, that we had him so long. But my God lives; and he has my heart. O what a legacy my husband and your father has left us! We are given to God; and there I am and love to be. Your affectionate mother, Sarah Edwards.”⁴³

On April 17, Esther Burr died. Sarah arrived, took the Burr children, and began the long trek back to Northampton where she meant to raise them. On October 1, she died.

A. E. Winship published a history of two colonial families, one of them the Pierpont-Edwards. In over 180 years that uncommon union contributed to the common life of the colonies and the nation thirteen college presidents, sixty-five professors, one hundred lawyers and a law school dean, thirty judges, sixty-six physicians and a medical school dean, eighty political leaders including three senators, three mayors of large cities, three governors, and a comptroller of the United States Treasury. The men were invariably college graduates and many held graduate degrees; the women were frequently described by their contemporaries as “highly intelligent” and “great readers.” Together, they wrote one hundred and thirty-five books, edited eighteen periodicals, sent over one hundred of their children on foreign mission, and filled lay missionary boards. They directed banks and insurance companies, owned coal mines and iron plants, had oil and silver interests. All this was accomplished without any inherited fortune, and there seems not to have been a robber baron among them.⁴⁴

One hundred years after the Great Awakening, Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded the students at Harvard Divinity School of a preacher he had heard in the church in Concord.⁴⁵ Emerson could not tell from the sermon whether the man had ever lived; his words were ghostly, abstract, doctrinal. Emerson found life a matter of the concrete, the immediate, the wonderful. Jonathan Edwards imparted precious little personal history in his sermons, but he did precisely what Emerson called upon his successors in the pulpit to do, to pass on life refined in the fires of thought. Edwards wrote and preached almost without exception what he knew through experience. His language was as broad as the great tradition, spoken afresh in 18th century New England. The life he refined in the fires of thought was the uncommon union he lived with Sarah Pierpont and their uncommon God. The spark that lit the fire was the tempered, disciplined, and powerful imagination of a man in love. The political world in which he spoke and wrote was bursting asunder with forces he attempted to tame. He may not have been equal to the task he set himself; no one could have been. But he left us a rigorous, precise, generous and constructive understanding of religious life, and an imaginative vision that may help us live with our own graced experience. For we, too, live in an age torn between the power of feeling and the demand of intelligence.

Notes

1. The rhetoric is hair-raising, no doubt of it, and it is not at all restricted to this one sermon. It ought not to be met with a simpleminded, liberal dismissal. Edwards requires an historically conscious interpretation, as do Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and John Paul II in all these matters. The point of the rhetoric is not to promote fear, but to transmute it and to awaken the congregation to God's love. On the language see Harold P. Simonson, Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmands Co., 1974), chapter 5.

2. On the strains in and on the Puritan tradition, see: Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 151-183; James W. Jones, The Shattered Synthesis: New England Puritanism Before the Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); and Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York: Viking Press, 1973). For examples of the excesses of the Great Awakening of which Edwards was critical, see Gilbert Tennent's sermon, “The Danger of the Unconverted Ministry” in The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences, edited by Alan Heimert and Perry Miller (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 71-99; see also James Davenport's hymn, ibid., 201-203 and his later confession and retraction, 257-262. The story of the awakening is told engagingly by Edwin Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). The awakening was criticized by the academic establishment; see the condemnation by the Harvard faculty in Heimert and Miller, 340-353. The most prominent and effective critiques were written by Charles Chauncy of Boston: Enthusiasm Described and Caution'd Against (1742) and Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743): for excerpts, see Heimert and Miller, 228-256 and 291-304.

3. The Edwardsians provided the bright light of American theology into the early nineteenth century. For accounts see Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 403-414; and F. H. Foster, A Genetic History of the New England Theology (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963).

4. Nathaniel Taylor of the new Yale Divinity School, although deeply indebted to the Edwardsians and Edwards himself, moved away from Calvinist orthodoxy on predestination, free will, and original sin, and so provided a theological rationale for the Arminian preachers of the second Great Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney the most prominent of them. Horace Bushnell, by means of a subtle Coleridgean hermeneutic, engaged in a reinterpretation of doctrines and a critique of New England theological method. Both men could be said to have moved left from an Edwardsian center. Charles Hodge, in order to protect doctrine and certainty in theology, moved right, fixing on the objectivity and inerrancy of the biblical “propositions.” He founded the Princeton theology which later became, in the work of B. B. Warfield and J. G. Machen, the intellectual backbone of twentieth century American fundamentalism. For representative selections of this post-Edwardsian movement, see Sidney Ahlstrom, ed., Theology in America: The Major Protestant Voices from Puritanism to Neo-Orthodoxy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1967), 211-250, 251-292, 317-370. For a discussion of Bushnell's theological method, see W. Shea, “Religious Language and Theological Method” in M. Lamb, ed., Creativity and Method: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981), 153-169.

5. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1968), especially the preface and, as an example of idealist demythologization, chapter 2 on the universal community.

6. William Clebsch traces out the themes of beauty and nature in his American Religious Thought: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). For a discussion of the positions of Peirce, James and Dewey on belief and action, see John E. Smith, Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). On aesthetics and religion in relation to Dewey's pragmatism, see W. Shea, “Qualitative Wholes: Aesthetic and Religious Experience in the Work of John Dewey,” Journal of Religion LX (1980), 32-50.

7. Peter Gay, “Jonathan Edwards: An American Tragedy,” in David Levin, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969).

8. Ola Windlow, Jonathan Edwards: 1703-1758 (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 115: “The weakness of his scholarship is that he usually has a hypothesis to prove, was committed beforehand to the conclusion, and zealously accumulated materials to that end. By doing so he missed much which would sometimes have established his conclusions more firmly, and sometimes have overthrown them.”

9. See Clifford Geertz, “Conjuring with Islam,” New York Review of Books XXIX (May 27, 1982), 25-28. For a disturbing example of incomprehension, see Sidney Hook's comment on the American Catholic Bishops' position on nuclear war, New York Times, December 26, 1982, E3.

10. See Clebsch, 6-7, 67-68, 115-116, 182-186.

11. Six volumes have been published in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957-1980) under the general editorship of Perry Miller and, after his death, of John E. Smith. The individual volumes are entitled: Freedom of the Will, Religious Affections, Original Sin, The Great Awakening, Apocalyptic Writings, and Scientific and Philosophical Writings. The single most important book in the retrieval and reappraisal of Edwards is: Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1949). For other valuable discussions, see: Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Garden City: Doubleday-Anchor, 1966); Roland Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Harold Simonson, above; and Patricia Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in 18th Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).

12. See the introduction to Works II: Religious Affections, 44-52.

13. For an illuminating study of the dialectic of mythos and logos in the Western theological tradition from the Greeks to contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy, see Robert Doran, Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1977).

14. John Herman Randall, Jr., The Role of Knowledge in Western Religion (Boston: Starr King Press, 1958), 141. Randall, an atheist, would in no way agree with Edwards on God's status-in-existence, but the disagreement did not stop him from talking about the nature of God and from announcing himself a theological Calvinist.

15. On classics in religion and theology, see David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroads Publishing Co., 1981), 99-229. I find it difficult to classify Edwards' work under the criteria sketched by Tracy. He may not be, after all, a “great” theologian and none of his works may be a certifiable classic. If Calvin is a classic, then Edwards may properly be regarded as a minor classic. He is certainly not a period piece, as all of his critics have turned out to be. Only a handful of American theologians deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with him, and they only with a stammer. I agree with the judgment of Sidney Ahlstrom: “… Edwards no longer stands in need of merely qualitative defence. His reputation as America's greatest speculative theologian is fairly secure. It is not at all apparent that the Reformed tradition anywhere in the world has produced his equal between John Calvin and Karl Barth or that America had a metaphysician of his stature until the late nineteenth century.” See A Religious History, 414. I think the metaphysician is Josiah Royce, and I suspect that Edwards will prove in the long run to be of more importance than Barth.

16. For an excellent study of imagination and world constitution, see Robert C. Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1981), 133-312; see also Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1976). On Edwards' imagination, see Simonson, the third chapter.

17. On the constructive function of imagination in theology, see Gordon Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method (Chico, California: Scholars' Press, 1975) and The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981); and Tracy, 193-230 on the dialectic of manifestation and proclamation in religious imagination.

18. For examples of theological protest, see the Concilium volumes edited by Kung (vols. 34, 44, 54, 74) and his writings on ecclesiastical issues such as infallibility, apostolic succession, celibacy, and women in the priesthood. The evangelical stand was evident in his early work; see The Council, Reform, and Reunion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967). For a discussion of Kung's role in contemporary theological and ecclesiastical politics, see Leonard Swidler, ed., Kung in Controversy (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981), and The Kung Dialogue (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1980).

19. Tracy's argument for public space and rules for theological discourse runs through his major works, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury Press, 1975) and The Analogical Imagination. In the earlier work it was conceived as a dialogue between theology and post-Enlightenment secularity which issued in a revisionist theology; in the latter, in terms of a three part loyalty of the theologian to society, church, and academy, the fruit of which is a responsible public discourse. The same vision was powerfully expressed by Josiah Royce in his phrase “community of interpretation”; see The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan Co., 1908) and The Problem of Christianity. A similar vision informs the work of John Dewey, passim.

20. I am using the term here nontechnically to mean a significant change in self-understanding. For a more technical discussion and illustration, see: William James, Varieties; Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972); Rosemary Haughton, The Transformation of Man: A Study of Conversion and Community (New York: Paulist Press, 1967); and Walter Conn, ed., Conversion: Perspectives on Personal and Social Transformation (New York: Alba House, 1978).

21. Not enough scholarly work has been done on the relationship to do any more than “suggest” at this point. For other discussions see the books of Winslow and Patricia Tracy. Elizabeth Dodds published an interesting and unpretentious book, Marriage to a Difficult Man (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971). It is a briefer rewriting of the Winslow and Miller biographies, now from the point of view of the marriage. My impression is that Edwards was less difficult than many, and far more interesting than most.

22. On Stoddard's remarkable career and influence, see Winslow, 15-34 and 95-107; Miller, 3-34 and his New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954); and David Lawrence, “Jonathan Edwards, Solomon Stoddard, and the Preparationist Model of Conversion,” Harvard Theological Review (1972), 267-283.

23. Dodds discusses the variant spellings of the name; see 9 and 315. On the founding of Yale College, see Winslow, 57-64.

24. Works IV: The Great Awakening, 144-211; excerpts are found in Charles H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 73-91.

25. Faust and Johnson, 57-72.

26. “Distinguishing Marks” and “Some Thoughts” are found in Works IV, 213-288 and 289-530; The Treatise is the subject of Works II: Religious Affections.

27. They are: Nature of True Virtue, ed. by William K. Frankena (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, found in The Works of President Edwards (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), I:441-535; The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, in Works III: Original Sin; and Freedom of the Will, in Works I.

28. “Sarah Pierpont,” in Faust and Johnson, 56.

29. Faust and Johnson, 58-59, 60-61.

30. The word conversion must be used cautiously. Although Jonathan and Sarah did single out turning points and significant advances, they were aware that the whole of their lives evidenced the grace of God. They are more properly called holy people or saints rather than converts. If they can be said to have been “born again,” they must be said to have undergone rebirth repeatedly. In my view their lives were a progress in grace and a process of refinement, the new stages of which were signalled by transformation of feeling and transvaluation of symbol. They are not examples of the later Evangelical preoccupation with the moment of assurance. Although they had their moments, Edwards was too much the Calvinist to put his faith in moments. For some theological literature on conversion, see n. 20 above.

31. See Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 203ff. The two other cases are Abigail Hutchinson, a spinster who died soon after her conversion, and Phoebe Bartlet, a four year old child who lived a long and pious life. For Edwards' account of the Bartlet case, see Faust and Johnson, 85ff; and for comments, Simonson, 48; Miller, 137ff; and Winslow, 158ff. We are no less tempted than his critical contemporaries to sneer at his use of the child, but Edwards, along with many Puritans and unlike our contemporaries, understood children to be objects of God's love and Satan's plots, and so “poised over the pit.” Given that premise, it is important to remember that Edwards was no fool who could easily be taken in by an eighteenth century version of Marjo Gortner.

32. Some Thoughts, Works IV, 331-341.

33. See the account by Dodds, 95-106. Edwards' pulpit was filled for the two weeks by Samuel Bell. The young man exhibited an ability to move his hearers to “enthusiastical displays,” and he did so with a vengeance in Northampton.

34. The Great Awakening was already cooling when Some Thoughts appeared. For a discussion of the recession, see Gaustad.

35. See the “Personal Narrative” in Faust and Johnson, 57-72, and the discussions of affectivity in Works II. Unfortunately I have not had access to the Diary, but excerpts are printed in Faust and Johnson. For comments on his conversion, see Simonson, 17-23.

36. See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1961); Joseph Marechal, Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics (Albany, New York: Magi Books, 1964); and William Johnston, The Inner Eye of Love: Mysticism and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

37. See the description in Dodds, 95-106, and the position of James Leuba on the psychosexual roots of mystical experience in The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Joseph Marechal responded vigorously to Leuba's book; see “Professor Leuba as a Psychologist of Mysticism,” in Marechal's Studies, 217-238. Leuba, after James, is the most influential American psychologist of religion and mysticism.

38. For accounts of the pastorate, the dismissal, and the reasons for it, see: Winslow, 223-246, and P. Tracy, 147-194.

39. The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards: Morality and Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 104-105.

40. Nature of True Virtue, 86-87, 96.

41. Dodds, 98, 104.

42. Winslow, 292.

43. Miller, 202-203; Winslow, 292.

44. A. E. Winship, Jukes-Edwards (New York: R. L. Myers, 1900), summarized in Dodds, 37-39. The family must not have been pleased with the achievements and reputation of one of Edwards' grandchildren, Aaron Burr, Jr. For a highly entertaining portrait of the younger Burr and his famous contemporaries by one of his (and Edwards') progeny, see Gore Vidal, Burr: A Novel (London: Heinemann, 1974).

45. “The Divinity School Address” in Ahlstrom's Theology in America, 293-316.