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Jonathan Edwards: The Theory Behind His Use of Figurative Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Paul R. Baumgartner
Paul R. Baumgartner*
Affiliation:
Harpur College, Binghamton, N.Y
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Extract

Concentration on the ascetic element in Puritanism has led to a misunderstanding of the Puritans' attitude towards style and the use of figurative language. Kenneth Murdock cites as characteristic of Puritan style in prose and poetry a tension arising from the conflict of theoretical asceticism with a recognition that practical effectiveness in preaching demanded an appeal to man's senses. “Constantly one feels in Puritan literature,” writes Murdock, “a conflict between the desire to convince and persuade by the readiest means, and the determination never to cross the line into pleasing the sensual man.” Thus, though the Puritan writer generally depreciated the power of words as dead things incapable of conveying the living truth, “he used figures of speech … because he knew that whatever the ideal potency of divine truth might be, fallen man responded most directly to it when some concessions were made to his errant fancy.” This resembles the theory of accommodation, and Mr. Murdock calls it by that name when he cites Richard Baxter as a kind of authority for the stylistic practice of American Puritans. While he admits that it is, in a strict sense, “borrowed and improper,” Baxter justifies his use of figurative language in terms of its usefulness and effectiveness. The American Puritans, armed with Baxter's “doctrine of accommodation,” formed their literary theory “in an attempt to answer the old riddle of how infinite and eternal variety is to be expressed in the finite terms comprehensible to mortal man.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1963 , pp. 321 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 Kenneth B. Murdock, Literature and Theology in Colonial New England (Cambridge, 1949), p. 50.

2 Murdock, p. 50.

3 Quoted in Murdock, p. 54.

4 Murdock, p. 65.

5 Edwin H. Cady, “The Artistry of Jonathan Edwards,” NEQ, xxii (March 1949), 61–72.

6 Jonathan Edwards, eds. Clarence H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson, in American Writers Series (New York, 1935), p. 373. All citations from Edwards in my text are to this edition unless otherwise indicated.

7 Cady, p. 65.

8 Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (New Haven, 1948), p. 49. As Miller points out, Edwards' intention in this work is to distinguish between tropes and types in order to establish a “true” typology. It is evident throughout the work, however, that the justification for figurative language in general is Edwards' belief in the analogy or “consent” of being. In the 8th Image (p. 44), for example, Edwards writes: “Again it is apparent and allowed that there is a great and remarkeable analogy in God's works. There is a wonderful resemblance in the effects which God produces, and consentaneity in His manner of working in one thing and another throughout all nature. … We see that even in the material world, God makes one part of it strangely to agree with another, and why is it not reasonable to suppose He makes the whole as a shadow of the spiritual world?”

9 A Divine and Supernatural Light, pp. 106–107.

10 Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World, p. 334.

11 Edwards raises this “sensationalism” to the level of pure idealism. There is no distinction here of form and matter. “Matter” itself is immaterial and the senses are themselves ideas which have a certain capacity to be stimulated by other ideas. The understanding does not differ essentially from the senses, but is a kind of general repository for the specific impressions of the five senses. Such an epistemology defies classification since the meanings which the words express imply distinctions which (according to Edwards) are not in “things.” It might be called a kind of ideal nominalism.

12 These statements are my summary of Edwards' doctrine in the Religious AJfections (pp. 206–254) and A Divine and Supernatural Light (pp. 102–109).

13 “Notes on the mind,” p. 37.

14 Religious Affections, p. 224.

15 Religious Ajfections, p. 224.