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Jonathan Edwards: The First Two Hundred Years
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
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Occasionally, even the student of American culture grown accustomed to its odd couples — Thomas Morton and lasses in beaver coats, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mark Twain and the Reverend Joseph Twichell — is brought up short. One does not, after all, expect to encounter the language and cadences of Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in a Walt Disney production of Pollyanna, a film in which the heroine's gladness has come to fulfill roughly the function of divine grace. And it is only slighdy less improbable to encounter in the New Yorker for 31 July 1978 the disembodied, dialectical voices of Donald Barthelme's The Leap, agreeing to postpone the leap of faitli to another day, setting aside their awareness that “We hang by a slender thread. — The fire boils below us — the pit. Crawling with roaches and other tilings. — Torture unimaginable.”
The use and misuse of Jonathan Edwards, or less moralistically, the observable process of advocacy, condemnation, adaptation, and creative redefinition focussed on his life and work, has a long and instructive history. In October of 1903 an important stage in that process had been reached when bicentennial celebrations of Edwards' birth resulted in a flourishing of tributes to die Edwards legacy and assessments of the permanent and the passing in his diought, as one writer put it. We may now, three quarters of a century later, have reached a stage of comparable significance, with a potential both for summing up and for speculating on what lies ahead.
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Daniel B. Shea is Professor of English at Washington Universtiy, St. Louis, Missouri 63130. This is revised version of a paper presented to the Division on American Literature to 1800 of the Modern Language Association, 30 December 1978, New York, N.Y.
1 The filmscript makes clear that a sermon preached by actor Karl Malden has been enriched by liberal borrowings from Edwards' famous text. Letter to the author, Archivist, Walt Disney Productions, 22 August 1978.
2 “The Edwards Bicentennial,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, 2 (12 1903), 166–69Google Scholar.
3 The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1977), 5, xGoogle Scholar.
4 The chief aids to such a study have been: the cryptic entries on Edwards in Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, 1802–1881, revised edition, 1, pt. 1 (New York, 1938)Google Scholar; Edwards Bibliography, Coss, John J., Cambridge History of American Literature (New York, 1917), 1, 432–38Google Scholar; “A List of Printed Materials on Jonathan Edwards,” Library of Congress Reading Room, November 1934, 29 pp.; the annotated bibliography in Faust, Clarence H. and Johnson, Thomas H., eds., Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections (New York, 1935), revised by Stephen S. Webb, 1962Google Scholar. A new bibliography of approximately 1500 printed references to Edwards, in preparation by M. X. Lesser, should encourage detailed study of developments in Edwards' reputation. A recent doctoral dissertation discusses, according to its abstract, “the impact of Jonathan Edwards on American thought.” See Weber, Donald, “The Image of Jonathan Edwards in American Culture” (Ph.D. Columbia Univ., 1978)Google Scholar.
5 Christian Monthly Spectator, 3 (1821), 298–315 and 357–65Google Scholar.
6 Park, Edwards, “Remarks of Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity,” Bibliotecha Sacra, 38 (1881), 147–87 and 333–69Google Scholar.
7 Stein, Stephen, “Jonathan Edwards and the Rainbow: Biblical Exegesis and Poetic Imagination,” New England Quarterly, 47 (1974), 440–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Squires, William Harder, Jonathan Edwards und seine Willenslehre, Inaugural-Dissertation, Leipzig, 1901Google Scholar; The Edwardean: A Quarterly, Devoted to the History of Thought in America (Clinton, N.Y.), 1 (10, 1903–07, 1904)Google Scholar. After the failure of The Edwardean, Squires disappeared into the classroom at Hamilton College where he once taught philosophy to B. F. Skinner. See Shea, Daniel, “B. F. Skinner: The Puritan Within,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 50 (1974), 420–23Google Scholar.
9 Thompson, Joseph P., “Jonathan Edwards: His Character, Teaching, and Influence,” Bibliotecha Sacra, 18 (1861), 815Google Scholar. Fisher, George P., in Jonathan Edwards: A Retrospect, ed. Gardiner, H. Norman (Boston, 1901), p. 79Google Scholar.
10 Hodge, Charles, “Jonathan Edwards and the Successive Forms of the New Divinity,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, 30 (1858), 603Google Scholar.
11 Two essays published in 1839 by members of the Princeton theological faculty and subsequently reprinted by Andrews Norton express alarm at the forms of “mock-German philosophy” associated with Coleridge and Cousin. Their specific objection to Cousin could as well have been applied to Edwards, whose metaphysics they describe as noble but about whose idealism they are either ignorant or silent: “This necessary transfusion of God into the universe destroys our very idea of God. He is made the substratum, the substance, of all existence; and we are only bubbles thrown up upon the bosom of the mighty ALL…” See Alexander, J. W., Dod, Albert, Hodge, Charles, “Transcendentalism of the Germans and of Cousin and Its Influence on Opinion in This Country,” in Miller, Perry, ed., The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 235–36Google Scholar. By the 1880s, common-sense materialism, once religion's philosophical support, had become a weapon in the hands of Darwinism and naturalistic science. Two vocabularies went forward simultaneously: a new “idealistic consensus” continued to validate theological inquiry while permitting empirical research, especially in psychology. See Pochmann, Henry A., German Culture in America, 1600–1900 (Madison, 1957), pp. 313–16Google Scholar, and Kuklick, Bruce, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven, 1977), pp. 61–62 and 138Google Scholar.
12 In the bibliographical essay appended to A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley, 1966)Google Scholar, Gay cites the support of traditional Edwards scholars in rejecting Miller's modernist thesis, but his strongly worded judgment of that thesis as “absurd” and “perverse” had the effect temporarily of closing the door, only recently reopened, on consideration of Edwards as anything but a doggedly fundamentalist historian. For the “union of history and prophecy” in Edwards, see, in addition to Stephen Stein's introduction to the Apocalyptic Writings, Bercovitch, Sacvan, “The Typology of America's Mission,” American Quarterly, 30 (1978), 135–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pfisterer, Karl Dietrich, The Prism of Scripture: Studies in History and Historicity in the Work of Jonathan Edwards, Anglo-American Forum, 1 (Bern and Frankfurt, 1975)Google Scholar, links Edwards' study of individual and communal experience in A Faithful Narrative, which he describes as Edwards' “masterpiece as an historian,” to the “cosmic explication” of his History of the Work of Redemption.
13 Tennent's eulogy, revived by Alan Heimert in his dedication of Religion and the American Mind to Perry Miller, appears as a note to Bostwick, David's sermon, “Self Disclaimed and Christ Exalted” in Bostwick and Francis Alison, Two Sermons, Preached at Philadelphia, before the Reverend Synod (Phil., 1758), pp. 47–48Google Scholar; Hopkins, Samuel, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1765)Google Scholar, reprinted in Levin, David, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (New York, 1969), p. 23Google Scholar.
14 “Thomas B. Chandler to Samuel Johnson,” 22 January 1768, in Herbert, and Schneider, Carol, eds., Samuel Johnson: His Career and Writings (New York, 1929), 1, 433–34Google Scholar.
15 Review of The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners, in Monthly Review, or Literary Journal, 51 (09, 1774), 246–47Google Scholar. See also reviews of The Freedom of the Will, ibid., 27 (December, 1762), 434–38; Original Sin, ibid., 36 (January, 1767), 17–21; History of the Work of Redemption, ibid., 52 (February, 1775), 117–20.
16 Jonathan Edwards, Jr. describes Calvinists as “nearly driven out of the field, by the Arminians, Pelagians, and Socinians” until the appearance of his father, whose “improvements,” further improved in the language of the younger Edwards and other New Divinity theologians, he goes on to itemize. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, D.D., ed. Edwards, Tryon (Andover, 1842), 1, 481 ffGoogle Scholar.
17 Dwight, Timothy, “Learning and Morals &c. of New-England,” Travels in New-England and New York (London, 1823), 4, 312–16Google Scholar.
18 The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Dexter, Franklin Bowditch (New York, 1901), 3, 273–75Google Scholar.
19 Miller, Samuel, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1803), 2, 30, 238, 395Google Scholar.
20 Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. Priestley, F. E. L. (Toronto, 1946), 1, 129, 381, and 3, 18–19Google Scholar. As A. O. Aldridge has shown, Godwin also relied heavily enough on Edwards' deprecation of the private affections to acknowledge the debt publicly when he was accused of distorting the American's views; “Jonathan Edwards and William Godwin on Virtue,” American Literature, 18 1947), 303–18Google Scholar.
21 Miller, Samuel, in The Library of American Biography, ed. Sparks, Jared (Boston, 1837), 171 ffGoogle Scholar.; Bancroft, George, The New American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1859), 7, 11Google Scholar; Allen, Alexander, Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1889), 384–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Waller, A. R. and Glover, Arnold (London, 1904)Google Scholar: “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen,” 12, 34, and “American Literature – Dr. Channing,” 10, 315–16; Maurice, Frederick Denison, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, New Edition with Preface (London, 1872), 2, 472Google Scholar; Stephen, Leslie, Hours in a Library (London, 1876), 2, 44–106Google Scholar.
23 The issues and their accompanying antagonisms may be traced in a running debate between Charles Hodge of Princeton and Edwards Park of Andover that began with a sternly doctrinal review by Hodge of Park's sermon, “The Theology of Intellect and That of the Feelings.” See the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, 22 (1850), 642–67, and 23 (1851), 306–47Google Scholar; Bibliotecha Sacra, 8 (1851), 135–80 and 9 (1852), 170–220Google Scholar. The axis of the debate shifted to Yale following a discourse by George Fisher listing the accomplishments of New England theology. See The New Englander, 53 (1858), 434 ffGoogle Scholar., Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, 30 (1858), 585–620Google Scholar, and finally, Porter, Noah in The New Englander, 18 (1860), 726–773Google Scholar.
24 For the Edwardsean orientation of these two novels see Buell, Lawrence, “Calvinism Romanticized: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Hopkins, and The Ministers Wooing,” ESQ, 24 (1978), 119–32Google Scholar and the introduction by Henry May to the Belknap edition of Oldtown Folks (Cambridge, Mass., 1966)Google Scholar.
25 Somewhat surprisingly, Emerson pairs Edwards on the Will with Sampson Reed's Swedenborgian Observations on the Growth of the Mind as “a work of the Reason” and a rare example of “the Contemplative Spirit” in America: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 12, 40Google Scholar. Other references to Edwards are less complimentary. See Journals 2, 159, 197 and 4, 257. Emerson owned an abridged 1824 edition of the Religious Affections: Harding, Walter, Emerson's Library (Charlottesville, 1967), p. 87Google Scholar.
26 The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston, 1847), 1, xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar.
27 In Horace Bushnell, ed. Smith, H. Shelton (New York, 1965), p. 255Google Scholar.
28 Dana, James, An Examination of the Late Reverend President Edwards' “Enquiry on Freedom of Will” (Boston, 1770)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beecher, Catharine's essay on cause and effect in acts of the will was published anonymously, “on account of circumstances quite peculiar,” explain the editors of the American Biblical Repository, 2 (10, 1839), 381–408Google Scholar; Stearns, Lewis French, The Evidence of Christian Experience (New York, 1890), p. 87Google Scholar.
29 Melville scholars who have pursued the allusion to Edwards disagree whether Bartleby is a version of the determined or undetermined will. See Patrick, Walton R., “Melville's ‘Bartleby’ and the Doctrine of Necessity,” American Literature, 41 (1969), 39–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Emery, Allan Moore, “The Alternatives of Melville's ‘Bartleby’,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 31 (1976), 170–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Richardson, Charles F.'s early history, American Literature, 1607–1885 (New York, 1886; reprinted 1910), p. 146Google Scholar, noting that Edwards had anticipated naturalistic emphasis on heredity and environment, went on to observe that Holmes, “the most strenuous anti-Calvinist in recent American literature, in his ‘Mechanism in Thought and Morals,’ sometimes seems to join hands with the eighteenth-century philosopher…” Reviews objecting to the incipiently Calvinist determinism of Elsie Venner appeared in The New Englander, 19 (1861), 524–31Google Scholar and The Boston Review, 1 (1861), 384–98Google Scholar.
31 The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes: Pages From An Old Volume of Life (Boston, 1891), 8Google Scholar, “Mechanism in Thought and Morals,” 260–314; “Jonathan Edwards,” 361–401.
32 Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Paine, Albert Bigelow (New York, 1917), 2, 719–20Google Scholar; The Works of Mark Twain: What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Baender, Paul (Berkeley, 1973), 19, 199–201Google Scholar.
33 Zenos, Andrew, “The Permanent and the Passing in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” The Interior, 34 (1903), 1275Google Scholar.
34 The largest claim made for Edwards' influence has been Johnson, Thomas's: “The voice, through these many American years, is the voice of Hawthorne, and Melville, and Emerson, and Whitman, and Adams. But the hand is the hand of Jonathan Edwards.” Literary History of the United States, fourth edition, revised (New York, 1974), p. 81Google Scholar.
35 The poet manqué tradition is represented by Edwards Park (“He possessed a rich imagination, and might have been one of the first poets of his age, had he not chosen to be the first theologian.”), “Duties of a Theologian,” American Biblical Repository, 2 (1839), 372Google Scholar; Channing, William Henry, “Jonathan Edwards and the Revivalists,” Christian Examiner, 43 (1847), 378Google Scholar; Beecher, Henry Ward, Norwood; or, Village Life in New England (New York, 1868), p. 326Google Scholar. Comparisons of Edwards and Dante are plentiful. The most extended is Allen, Alexander's in Gardiner, H. Norman, ed. Jonathan Edwards: A Retrospect (Boston, 1901), pp. 8–20Google Scholar. The case for Edwards' eloquence is summed up by Griswold, Rufus W., The Prose Writers of America (1706–1870), revised edition (Philadelphia, 1870), p. 56Google Scholar. Descriptions of Edwards' prose as “slovenly,” mechanical, and “heavy” occur in writers as diverse as Timothy Dwight and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A typical apology is offered by Increase Tarbox, , Bibliotecha Sacra, 26 (1869), 263Google Scholar: “As we read his works we are sensible continually that the style is not polished, but strong: that it lacks the graces and felicities, but keeps its iron tramp straight on, and does not fail to reach its end.”
36 Lynen, John, The Design of the Present (New Haven, 1969), 111–16Google Scholar; Delattre, Roland, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1968)Google Scholar; Griffith, John, “Jonathan Edwards as Literary Artist,” Criticism, 15 (1973), 156–73Google Scholar.
37 Lowance, Mason, “ ‘Images or Shadows of Divine Things’ in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” in Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Typology and Early American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), pp. 209–44Google Scholar; Tallon, John, “Flight Into Glory: The Cosmic Imagery of Jonathan Edwards” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. Pennsylvania, 1972)Google Scholar; Stein, Stephen, “Jonathan Edwards and the Rainbow,” New England Quarterly, 47 (1974), 440–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weddle, David, “Jonathan Edwards on Men and Trees and the Problem of Solidarity,” Harvard Theological Review, 67 (1974), 155–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 The speakers are, respectively, Osgood, Samuel, “Jonathan Edwards,” Christian Examiner, 44 (1848), 381Google Scholar; Orr, James, “The Influence of Edwards,” Exercises Commemorating the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Jonathan Edwards (Andover, 1904), p. 123Google Scholar; Increase Tarbox, , Bibliotecha Sacra 26 (1869), 255nGoogle Scholar.
39 Bushman, Richard L., “Jonathan Edwards as Great Man: Identity, Conversion, and Leadership in the Great Awakening,” Soundings, 52 (1969), 15–46Google Scholar and “Jonathan Edwards and Puritan Consciousness,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 5 (1966), 383–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.
40 Not, to be sure, for his studies of Edwards. Smyth and other faculty associated with the Andover Review were accused of departures from the Seminary creed, including a modal definition of the persons of the Trinity. See The Andover Heresy (Boston, 1887)Google Scholar.