Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
[147] _Ibid._, p. 87.
[148] _Ibid._, p. 81.
[149] Published under the title of _Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America_ by the Yale University Press, 1925.
[150] _Letters ..._, in edition of 1904, p. 56.
[151] _Ibid._, pp. 52-55.
[152] _Ibid._, p. 76.
[153] _Ibid._, pp. 77, 79.
[154] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[155] _Ibid._, pp. 57-58.
[156] _Ibid._, pp. 58-60.
[157] _Ibid._, pp. 90-91.
[158] See, e. g., “The Man of Sorrows,” “The Wyoming Massacre,” “The
History of Mrs. B.,” “The Frontier Woman.”
[159] See, e. g., “The American Belisarius” and “Landscapes.”
[160] _Sketches of Eighteenth Century America_, p. 249.
Chapter II • The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards
I
Before an adequate democratic philosophy could arise in this world of
pragmatic individualism, the traditional system of New England theology
must be put away, and a new conception of man and of his duty and
destiny in the world must take its place. For the moment Calvinism was
strengthened by the coming of the Scotch-Irish who spread the familiar
dogmas along the frontier, remote from attack by old-world rationalism;
nevertheless those dogmas carried within them the seeds of slow decay.
The world that had created them lay in a forgotten past. The five
points of Calvinism, postulated on a God of wrath, were no longer
living principles answering to common experience; they were become no
other than ghosts that walked on the Sabbath to terrify the timid. An
intellectual _Aufklärung_ was a necessary preliminary to the creation
of a fruitful social philosophy. Theology must be made to square with
actuality, or yield control of men’s minds to more stimulating things.
But unfortunately there was no vigorous attack but only a tedious
decay. The old was too deeply entrenched to be routed, and stricken
with palsy it lingered out a morose old age. For years New England
stewed in its petty provincialism, untouched by the brisk debates that
stirred the old world. No vigorous disputant challenged its orthodoxy.
In the year 1726 Cotton Mather wrote, “I cannot learn, That among
all the Pastors of Two Hundred Churches, there is one Arminian; much
less an Arian, or a Gentilist.”[161] Nevertheless rationalism was
in the air, and although it might be excluded from the minister’s
study, it spread its subtle infection through the mass of the people.
The backwash of English deism reached the shores of New England, and
by the decade of the forties a movement of liberalism seems to have
got under way. The word Arminian sprinkles more freely the pages of
controversial literature, indicating the nature of the attack being
directed against Calvinism. Dogma was face to face with rationalism.
A critical movement had long been developing in England, undermining
there the foundations of Calvinism; and in this work members of the
Anglican clergy had aided. Hooker had been a rationalist and the
influence of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was thrown in favor of an
appeal to reason and to history. He rejected a literal Hebraism for
a more philosophical interpretation of the Scripture. “The Light of
naturall understanding, wit and reason, is from God,” he argued; “he
it is which thereby doth illuminate every man entring into the World.
He is the Author of all that we think or do by vertue of that light
which himselfe hath given.”[162] Because of this rationalizing tendency
the Anglican clergy, before the middle of the seventeenth century, had
passed from the Calvinistic to the Arminian position. The fundamental
dogma of Arminianism was the doctrine of the freedom of the will--that
the elect of God are not pre-chosen, but a righteous life and good
works will bring men into the way of salvation. Destructive of the
whole Calvinistic system as such doctrine was--striking at the taproot
of determinism--Arminianism carried a social significance greater than
its theological import: it was an expression of the ideal of individual
responsibility that emerged from the decay of the feudal system. The
first reformers had asserted the right to individual interpretation
of the Scriptures; the Arminians threw upon the individual the whole
responsibility, bidding him assert his will and achieve his own
salvation.
English rationalism was carried further by a notable group of thinkers,
including Milton and Locke, who rapidly passed from Arminianism to
Arianism, and thence to Deism. By the beginning of the eighteenth
century English Presbyterianism, which had clung to Calvinism long
after the defection of the Anglicans, was undermined by the growing
rationalism and finally passed over into Unitarianism. Calvinism had
lost the battle in the old world and ceased to play an important part
in the intellectual life of England. In the face of this steady drift
away from the conception of a divine Will that dwarfed the human will
and held it fixed in the mesh of the divine purpose, towards the
conception of the responsibility of the individual and the significance
of the moral code in the work of salvation, the New England Calvinists
found their work cut out for them. A critical spirit was stirring, an
incipient rationalism was beginning to ask questions; orthodoxy for
the first time was on the defensive, and ill equipped for the pending
battle.
But Calvinism had fallen into the clutch of forces greater and more
revolutionary than either minister or congregation realized. To preach
with convincing force one must appeal to the common experience; dogma
must seem to square with the evident facts of life; it must appear
to be the inevitable and sufficient explanation of the mysteries and
perplexities that beset men in the world of reality. When it ceases to
be a reasonable working hypothesis in the light of common experience,
it is no longer a controlling influence in men’s lives. And this was
the unhappy predicament in which Calvinism now found itself. Take, for
example, the doctrine of total depravity. In the corrupt worlds of
Augustine and John Calvin such a doctrine must have seemed a reasonable
explanation of the common brutality; an evil society must spring from
the evil heart of man. But in the village world of New England the
doctrine had lost its social sanction. When in moments of calm sense
these provincial Calvinists asked themselves if the human heart were
in truth utterly depraved, if they themselves and their neighbors were
such vipers and worms as they professed to be, the conviction must have
grown upon them that such professions were untrue. The everyday life of
the New England village was animated by rugged virtues--by kindliness
toward neighbors and faithfulness to a strict ethical code, rather than
by hatred to God and man, or brutal wallowing in sin. In short, these
villagers knew that they were very far from a bad lot; and when they
pondered on this fact they must have discovered increasing difficulty
in reconciling Sunday dogma and week-day experience. Although they
repeated the familiar creed, the sanction for that creed was gone; it
was the voice of dogma that spoke, and not the voice of reason and
experience.[163]
Such is the explanation, as well, of the decay of another of the
cardinal points of Calvinism--the dogma of special election. In an
aristocratic society it is natural to believe that God has set men
apart in classes; but as the leveling process tended to strip away
social distinctions, the new individualism undermined the older class
psychology. When the common man has freed himself from political
absolutism, he will become dissatisfied with theological absolutism.
The right to achieve salvation is a natural corollary to the right to
win social distinction; that one’s future status lay wholly beyond the
reach of one’s will, that it rested in the hands of an arbitrary God
who gave or withheld salvation at pleasure, was a conception that ill
accorded with the nascent ideal of democracy. When that ideal should
be sufficiently clarified, the dogma of the elect of God, like the
aristocratic conception of the king’s favorite, would be quietly put
away in the potter’s field.
As the century advanced, the growing dissatisfaction with Calvinism
received fresh impetus from the new social philosophy of France. The
teaching of Rousseau that in a state of nature men were good, that
they are still sound at heart, and that the evils of civilization
have resulted from a perversion of the social contract, would appeal
to men whose experience was daily teaching them the falseness of the
traditional dogmas; and the ideal of equality would come home with
special meaning to men bred up in villages and on the frontier. Such
doctrines were fundamentally hostile to the spirit of Calvinism: not
only did Rousseau set the doctrine of human perfectibility over against
the dogma of total depravity, but he quickened the passion of revolt
against every form of arbitrary authority, theological as well as
political and social. Although the provincial colonial might not come
in immediate contact with such speculative philosophy, in the long
run he could not escape being influenced by it, and that influence
would count against a decadent theology that held men’s minds in its
tenacious _rigor mortis_.
The crux of the question, it came finally to be seen by the apologists
of the old order, lay in the fundamental problem of determinism. Was
the will of man effectively free, or was it held in strict subjection
to the stable will of God? According as the decision went touching
this question, would stand or fall the entire metaphysical structure
of Calvinism. To this problem, therefore, the best minds among the
ministers directed their thought; and the historical position of
Jonathan Edwards, greatest of the defenders of Calvinism, is revealed
in its true perspective when his labors are studied in the light of
this vital question.
II
Never had the traditional theology been so sorely in need of a champion
as at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century;
and such a champion God raised up--many devout Calvinists believed--in
the person of Jonathan Edwards. Armed at all points--a theologian
equipped with the keenest dialectics, a metaphysician endowed with a
brilliantly speculative mind, a psychologist competent to deal with
the subtlest phenomena of the sick soul--here was a man who might be
counted on to justify the ancient dogmas to the troubled churches of
New England.
The offspring of four generations of religious enthusiasts, by every
right of heredity and training the child of Puritanism, Jonathan
Edwards was the last and greatest of the royal line of Puritan mystics.
As a young man he felt himself to be living in the very presence of
God; he was conscious of the divine life flowing through and around
him, making him one with the Godhood; and he was filled with yearning
for personal union with the divine love in Christ. His intellectual and
spiritual life was molded by a God-consciousness as passionate as that
of Spinoza; and it is this fact of a lifelong devotion to the God-idea
that furnishes the clue to an understanding of his later development.
Not content that God had marked him for His own, he must build a
philosophical universe about the Godhood, justifying his mysticism by
a metaphysical idealism. He must examine critically the foundations of
his creed and establish his theology upon philosophy. No obscurity must
remain unprobed, no link in the chain of reasoning escape challenge:
he must base the five points of Calvinism upon a metaphysics that
should relate them to a universal system of thought, giving them a
cosmic as well as a Biblical sanction. It was a great ambition, likely
to prove too difficult even for the remarkable powers of Edwards; and
if in pursuit of new arguments for old doctrines, he found himself