Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
will is subject to desire, and desire follows what seems to us good;
hence the determining impulse is to be sought in the impulse to seek
the apparent good. The ethical import of such an argument will turn,
of course, upon the character of the good which the natural man may
be expected to desire. To Rousseau with his benevolent interpretation
of human nature nothing is to be feared from the subjection of will
to desire. Nor to the younger Edwards, feeling his way along the path
of transcendentalism, rediscovering the doctrine of the inner light,
was such subjection to be feared. In a remarkable sermon published
in 1734, he had expounded the thesis, “That there is such a thing
as a Spiritual and Divine Light, immediately imparted to the Soul
by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural
means.”[168] The divine splendor which the idealist had seen diffused
through the material world the theologian was now merging with the
regenerative life of the Holy Spirit which “acts in the mind of a
saint as an in-dwelling vital principle.” It is “a kind of emanation
of God’s beauty, and is related to God as the light is to the sun”;
it is a new vision by means of which one may “see the beauty and
loveliness of spiritual things.” In such a reinterpretation of the
Quaker doctrine--so harshly condemned by the earlier Puritans--Edwards
entered upon a train of thought that threatened to disrupt the entire
Calvinistic system. He was at the dividing of the ways; he must abandon
transcendentalism or the dogma of total depravity.
Instead he sought refuge in compromise, endeavoring to reconcile what
was incompatible. Herein lay the tragedy of Edwards’s intellectual
life; the theologian triumphed over the philosopher, circumscribing
his powers to ignoble ends. The field of efficiency allotted by the
later theologian to this “in-dwelling vital principle,” was no longer
coextensive with the universe, but was narrowed to the little world
of the elect. In the primal state of man, Edwards argued, before the
sin of Adam had destroyed the harmony between creature and creator,
the light which flowed from God as from a sun shone freely upon His
universe, filling its remotest parts with the divine plenitude; but
with the fall the harmony was destroyed, the sun was hidden, and only
stray beams broke through the rifts to shine upon those whom God willed
them to shine upon; all else in creation was given over to eternal
darkness. And if the natural man, thus cast into sudden darkness “as
light ceases in a room when the candle is withdrawn,” is a being whose
will is impotent to his salvation, it follows that he will now be
impelled as inevitably towards evil as before he was impelled towards
good. Every instinct of a nature corrupt and compact of sin, and with
no wish to exchange darkness for light--having no eyes for the divine
glory--drives him to a blind and consuming hatred of God. He is become
as a loathsome “viper, hissing and spitting poison at God,” the
outcast and pariah of the universe. There is no drawing back from the
conclusion involved in the argument; the Edwardean logic moves forward
by regular steps. The punishment meted out to sin is to be measured
by the excellence of which the sin is a denial. God is of infinite
excellence, and denial of His excellence is therefore infinitely sinful
and merits infinite punishment. As a perfectly just judge God could not
decree otherwise; because of the infinite heinousness of his sin, the
natural man must receive the doom of eternal damnation.[169]
Under the rod of such logic--grotesque, abortive, unseasoned by any
saving knowledge of human nature--Edwards preached that remarkable
series of imprecatory sermons that sank deep into the memory of New
England, and for which it has never forgiven him.[170] Unfortunate
as those sermons were in darkening the fame of an acute thinker,
disastrous as they were in providing a sanction for other men to
terrify the imaginations of ill-balanced persons, we cannot regret that
Edwards devoted his logic to an assiduous stoking of the fires of hell.
The theology of Calvin lay like a heavy weight upon the soul of New
England, and there could be no surer way to bring it into disrepute,
than to thrust into naked relief the brutal grotesqueries of those
dogmas that professed thus to explain the dark mysteries which lie upon
the horizons of life. For a long while yet they were to harass the
imagination of New England, but the end already could be foreseen. Once
the horrors that lay in the background of Calvinism were disclosed to
common view, the system was doomed. It might still wear the semblance
of life; it might still remain as an evil genius to darken the
conscience of men and women; but its authoritative appeal was gone. In
this necessary work of freeing the spirit of New England, no other
thinker played so large or so unconscious a part as Jonathan Edwards;
and it was the notorious minatory sermons--the translation into vivid
images of the generalized dogmas--that awakened the popular mind to an
understanding of the conclusions involved in the premises.
While Edwards was thus hastening the decay of Calvinism with his lurid
painting of “the landscape of hell,” in another phase of his work he
was engaged in awakening an interest in religion among the slothful
churches. He had long been interested in the phenomena of conversion,
and as the great revival of the forties, led by Whitefield, spread from
England to the colonies, he joined eagerly in the work. In consequence
of an earlier revival in his parish of Northampton, his attention had
been drawn to the little understood psychology of the awakening soul,
and with the detachment of the scientist he set himself to study the
problem. The terrors aroused by his minatory sermons provided his
clinical laboratory with numerous cases of abnormal emotionalism. Day
after day he probed and analyzed and compared, until as a result of
his close studies in vivisection, he became a specialist in the theory
of conversion, commanding the eager attention of a generation that had
come to look upon this as the central fact of Christian experience.
It is not easy today to be sympathetic with this phase of Edwards’s
work; it belongs equally with his dogmas to a world of thought that
is no longer ours. The repulsive records as they are set down in his
_Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God_, marked by evidence of
pathological states of mind not far removed from insanity, no longer
seem a testimony to God’s beneficent presence; the spiritual writhings
which this gentle-natured student watched with such fascination,
appear rather to be cases for the alienist to prescribe for. But to
Edwards the terrors of a five-year-old girl were not pathological;
they were the soul-labors of the spiritual rebirth, the visible signs
of the supreme miracle of the universe, filling him with wonder and
awe at God’s infinite mercy; and like a modern psychologist he was
at enormous pains to chart the successive steps in the miraculous
transformation.[171]
Other and greater consequences were to flow from the new revivalism.
The Great Awakening was the single movement that stirred the colonial
heart deeply during three generations. It reveals, among other things,
that America was still living in the world of the seventeenth century:
that the upper class was not yet rationalized, nor the middle class
commercialized. Theology was still of greater popular interest than
politics. In its chief phenomena the Great Awakening was a return to an
earlier age--to those unbalanced enthusiasms of the Puritan upheaval.
It was essentially a mass movement. Its use of hypnotic suggestion, its
lurid terrorism, its outcries and hysterical possessions, reveal like
the Ranters of a hundred years before the phenomena of mob psychology,
and it made appeal to the ill-educated, the isolated, the neurotic, to
the many natural victims of hypnotic excitation bred by the monotony
and austerity of village life. Its after effects were revolutionary,
for the quickening of religious emotionalism marked the beginning of
the end of Puritan formalism.
The bitter quarrel among the churches which followed as an aftermath
was more than a theological dispute; it was a sign of the breaking
up of the traditional parish system. The hierarchy had long before
lost its authority, but in their several parishes the ministers still
enjoyed patriarchal power. The tragic dismissal of Edwards from his
parish was an unprecedented revolt against that authority. But greater
changes were to follow. After the Great Awakening itinerant preachers
made their appearance, who presumed to enter any parish without the
consent of the minister, and preach such doctrines as they would. They
were non-conforming free lances, hostile to the established church,
whose stock-in-trade was the new emotionalism. Under their leadership,
Separatist congregations were gathered that were not only an offense to
the regular establishment but a challenge to its authority. Hundreds
left the old congregations and flocked to the Baptists and Methodists,
and naturally they would make trouble over paying taxes to support a
church they had repudiated. In short, a little revolution was under way
that was to end in the complete disintegration of the parish system.
By a curious irony of fate, Jonathan Edwards, reactionary Calvinist
and philosophical recluse, became the intellectual leader of the
revolutionaries. His insistence upon conversion as the sole ground
of admission to communion was the final blow that destroyed the old
theocratic system which the Mathers had labored to uphold. Church
and state were effectively cut asunder by such a test. There is no
evidence that Edwards was concerned about the political or social
consequences that must result from the abandonment of the traditional
“Half-way Covenant.” It was a question of doctrine with him, involving
only matters of church discipline. Although he was accused of being a
Separatist, and of seeking to disintegrate the parish system, he had no
thought of attacking a parochial order that he held in high esteem. He
was unconcerned that his teachings led straight to the old Separatist
conclusion that it is the church mystical which Christ established,
and not the church visible. Nevertheless he became the creator of the
new Congregationalism, which in accepting the democratic principles
elaborated by John Wise and establishing the local church as an
autonomous unit, effectively nullified the Presbyterian tendencies of
the old order.
As one follows the laborious career of this great thinker, a sense of
the tragic failure of his life deepens. The burdens that he assumed
were beyond the strength of any man. Beginning as a mystic, brooding
on the all-pervasive spirit of sweetness and light diffused through
the universe, with its promise of spiritual emancipation; then turning
to an archaic theology and giving over his middle years to the work
of minifying the excellence of man in order to exalt the sovereignty
of God; and finally settling back upon the mystical doctrine of
conversion--such a life leaves one with a feeling of futility, a sense
of great powers baffled and wasted, a spiritual tragedy enacted within
the narrow walls of a minister’s study. There was both pathos and irony
in the fate of Jonathan Edwards, removed from the familiar places
where for twenty years he had labored, the tie with his congregation
broken, and sent to the frontier mission at Stockbridge to preach to a
band of Indians and to speculate on the unfreedom of the human will.
The greatest mind of New England had become an anachronism in a world
that bred Benjamin Franklin. If he had been an Anglican like Bishop