The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards 9780231896184

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T H E PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS

T h e Edwards Memorial in First Church, Northampton, Massa chusetts. This life-size bronze plaque was unveiled on June 22 1900, one hundred and fifty years after the dismissal of Edward from his Northampton pulpit. It was designed and sculpture« by Herbert Adams. (Reproduced from a photograph suppliet by the Forbes Library, Northampton.)

The PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY of JONATHAN EDWARDS

By Douglas J. Elwood

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Copyright © 1960 Columbia University Press, New York Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-12503 Manufactured in the United States of America

To My Wife

PREFACE

JONATHAN EDWARDS was gifted with extraordinary vision and dialectical powers. His vision was at once a simple and immediate apprehension of a "divine and

supernatural

l i g h t " which flooded his world and his soul, and an extremely complex intuition in w h i c h Being, truth, virtue, beauty, and holiness fused into a splendor which ravished him all his days. His illuminating and probing mind sought out all knowledge available to h i m and gave it a form and brilliance all his own, so that no other man wrote like him. H e observed and analyzed, read and meditated, explored and argued, always in the presence of that "great and glorious B e i n g " whose excellency was his joy and his delight. Mysticism and logic, delight and discourse, emotion and thought, were united one with another in Edwards' mind to produce writing which is poetry, philosophy, and theology, all at once. Edwards enjoyed his vision and he enjoyed his dialectics. He enjoyed feeling and he enjoyed thinking, but he enjoyed immediately his G o d w h o was to him both m i n d and love: a mind infinitely rich and a love of infinite self-communication. Edwards rejoiced in his G o d because H e loved "Being-in-general" primarily, and particular beings accordingly. God's love was to Edwards an intelligent love, at once benevolent and rational, without sentimentality and without frigidity. It is no surprise therefore that G o d had communicated the same love to him. T h e rare wonder of Edwards is the exhilarating union in him of many-

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PREFACE

sided sensibility with intellectual power. It is as though Edwards' spirit had escaped the ravages of "original sin." His mind and heart, equally whole and vigorous, worked exuberant harmony one with the other. It is certainly a joy to know a man like him. One is reminded of Mozart. But this very spiritual and intellectual excellence of Edwards, coupled with the demands he makes upon the spirit and the mind of his reader, made his work unapproachable both to his friends and his enemies. He was unique both in vision and in dialectics; and his very uniqueness prevented him from exerting an influence, corresponding to his powers, upon the history of America and the Western world. His successors who forged the "New England Theology" out of traditional Calvinism and colonial politics did him profound ill service by representing him as their mentor and ally against the "Arminians." Edwards became known as an opponent of "the freedom of the will" and a champion of "original sin" and "total depravity." With the decline of Calvinism and the progress of Unitarianism, Edwards was set aside as the high priest of an obnoxious theology—or was set up as a fearful example of it. Subsequently, he was rediscovered as a man who in his youth had given promise of becoming an original and creative philosopher but had, alas, in maturity wasted his talents on theology. There has appeared an occasional regard for his "mysticism" or an occasional tribute paid him as a thinker. But in either case there has been no serious concern with him as a mind whose vision and dialectics might exert a fresh and quickening influence upon the mind of our age. Those impressed by his spirituality have done no justice to his intelligence, and those impressed by his intelligence have been impervious to his "sense of divine things." B u t Ed-

PREFACE

ix

wards is his vision and his intellect. Without the one or the other he is not Edwards, and unless we see him as both we are bound to misunderstand him and deprive ourselves of his gifts. It is the great virtue of Dr. Elwood's book that it turns our attention both to the spirituality and the intellectual excellence of Edwards' mind. Edwards not only insisted upon the immediacy of our knowledge of God but also argued it with the full use of his dialectical powers. With his vision he demolished deism and with his dialectics he demolished pantheism. He had his own way of combining Scripture and reason in our knowledge of Cod. He had his own way of thinking together the sovereignty of God and the workings of the Newtonian world as well as the "ability" of man. He worked out a profound and logical solution to the problem of man's place in Being-in-general. He produced the core of a metaphysic in which science, philosophy, theology, aesthetics, ethics, were united into a vision at once simple and complex. We are greatly indebted to Dr. Elwood's painstaking work for a new and much-needed presentation of this simplicity and complexity which characterized the mind of Edwards. We hope that his book will receive the attention it deserves as a pioneer undertaking and a competent job. Coming at a time when a new edition of Edwards' works is being prepared, it may well contribute greatly to a revival of interest in this giant of spirit and mind, both for justice to Edwards and for our own profit. It would take too long to argue the relevance of Edwards' intellectual labors to our own situation. T h e climate of opinion and feeling today is not such that we will readily take over Edwards' vision, or his philosophy. W e are

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PREFACE

not given to "mysticism," and "idealism" is not a favored philosophy among us. It is often taken for granted that "the knowledge of God" is not a rational cognition, and that metaphysics itself is a waste of time. We have much to worry about that apparently has nothing to do with Being-in-general as "a supernatural light." Most of our theologians have all but given up the prospect of a synthesis of knowledge which shall unify our experience in the light of the infinite excellency of God. Edwards' grand style of feeling and thinking is not ours and is alien to our way of life. Perhaps, after due deliberation, we shall decide that Edwards is not for us. Nevertheless, deliberate we must. We must take the trouble to rediscover Edwards, hoping that he shall give us a fresh start toward a vision and intelligence which are sorely needed in this day of perplexity and inefficacy. Vision is what we do not have. Vision is what Edwards has. Without vision, the people perish. W e may not be able to take over Edwards' own vision, but he may well quicken us and give us hope. He may even point the way. And that will be a great help. Chicago, Illinois May, 1960

J O S E P H HAROUTUNIAN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I T is M Y PLEASURE to acknowledge with gratitude those who have contributed toward the improvement of this book or have assisted in its preparation for publication. Joseph Haroutunian of McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, has played the part of counselor to the whole enterprise. Charles Duthie of the Scottish Congregational College, Edinburgh, was the first to urge the publication of my Edwards study. Richard Niebuhr and Sydney Ahlstrom, both of Yale Divinity School, and John Baillie, formerly of the University of Edinburgh, all gave me initial encouragement in the line of interpretation I was taking. J o h n E. Smith of the Yale Faculty of Arts offered constructive criticism of particular points. Thomas Schafer of McCormick Theological Seminary gave unstintingly of his time in a critical reading of the finished manuscript in addition to making available to me his careful transcripts of some of the "Miscellanies." Marjorie Wynne, Librarian of the Rare Book Room, Yale University Library, has extended every courtesy in making the Edwards manuscripts available for use in the preparation of this volume. Above all, I am indebted to my wife, who gladly relieved me of many domestic responsibilities while this book was in process and, doubtless, without whose personal confidence in me this book would have remained in rough draft.

My work lays no claim to finality. I will be rewarded if it succeeds only in drawing attention to the hidden side

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of a neglected but important American, and if it helps to stimulate research in the same direction. T h e highest reward for any author is to see his own work recognized and eventually overtaken. Acknowledgment for permission to quote is due Cambridge University Press, for The

Nature

of the

Physical

Universe, by Sir Arthur S. Eddington; Henry Holt and Company, for Piety Versus Moralism,

by Joseph Haroutunian;

Harper and Brothers, for Christian

Faith and Natural

ence, by Karl Heim; Sheed 8c Ward, Ltd., for An Synthesis,

edited by Erich Przywara;

Crofts, Inc., for Philosophies

of Science

Sci-

Augustine

Appleton-Century(copyright 1942, by

F. S. Crofts 8c Co., Inc.), by Albert G. Ramsperger; Abingdon Press, for God in His

World,

by Charles S. Duthie;

Thomas Nelson 8c Sons, for Berkeley's

Immaterialism,

by

A. A. Luce. Marshall,

May,

1960

Missouri

DOUGLAS J . ELWOOD

CONTENTS PREFACE, BY JOSEPH HAROUTUNIAN ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I.

INTRODUCTION: EDWARDS AND THE THIRD W A Y

VÜ XI I

MAJESTY AND IMMEDIACY IN THE BEING OF GOD

12

III.

BEYOND THEISM

33

IV.

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL EVIL

65

THE SELF-GIVING NATURE OF GOD

90

II.

V. VI. VII.

A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

113

CONCLUSIONS

150

APPENDIX: SOME PERMANENT CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT AWAKENING

161

NOTES

163

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS

199

BIBLIOGRAPHY

203

INDEX

215

THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS

I. INTRODUCTION: EDWARDS AND THE THIRD WAY T h e first instance that I remember of that sort of inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was on reading those words, I Timothy ¡.17, "Now unto the Ring eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before. . . . I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy 1 should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt u p in him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed u p in him foreverl . . . This I know not how to express otherwise, than by a calm, sweet abstraction of soul . . . and sometimes a kind of vision, or fixed ideas and imaginations, of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and rapt and swallowed u p in God. T h e sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden kindle up, as it were, a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of soul that I know not how to express. . . . my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. T h e appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. J O N A T H A N EDWARDS *

of Jonathan Edwards has rested so long on the caricature of him as a "sulphurous, ranting revivalist" who "devoted his assiduous logic to stoking the fires of hell" 1 is one of the ironies in the history of American thought. This caricature has been perpetuated, until T H A T T H E REPUTATION

• Personal Narrative, in Works, I, 16-17 (Dwight ed.).

2

EDWARDS AND T H E THIRD WAY

recently, by the appearance of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"" in standard American literature texts as representing his outstanding literary achievement. Today most students of American thought recognize that the famous Enfield sermon is not nearly so representative of Edwards as it is of his time. That historians of America's intellectual culture are now rereading Edwards reflects the fact that the serious questions of meaning and destiny with which he grappled have become once again urgent problems. The contemporary scene compels us to return to men of Edwards' intellectual stature and vision to help us find answers to questions of universal concern. It is possible that we today are in a better position than any previous generation since Edwards to understand and appreciate the range and depth and seriousness of the problems with which he was all his life preoccupied. In a recent book by the Hawthorne specialist, Randall Stewart, a helpful comparison is drawn between the relevance of Edwards and of Franklin. Franklin started us on the road which has led to a gadgeteers' paradise. But now that it is becoming startlingly clear that gadgets can't save us, and may all too readily destroy us; now that thoughtful members of this mechanistic age are seriously asking the question which the Philippian jailer, trembling, put to Paul and Silas, 'Sirs, what must I do to be saved?'; now that Dr. Franklin's lightning rod begins to look, from one viewpoint, like a pathetic symbol of human pride and inadequacy, while Edwards' soul-probings seem more searching to this generation of readers perhaps than they have ever seemed before, it is possible that Edwards will yet emerge, is already emerging, as the more useful, the more truly helpful, of the two. 2

Edwards is generally recognized to be the most eminent philosopher-theologian this country has produced, and some

EDWARDS AND T H E THIRD WAY

3

regard him as one of the greatest thinkers of all Christian history. One writer calls him " a giant among Christian thinkers" and " a teacher of all those who would take a serious view of Christianity as an intellectual enterprise." 3 If for no other reason, Edwards will always fascinate because his system of thought is the first to have grown out of native American soil and climate. Herbert Schneider is right when he says that the uniqueness of Edwards' thought lies in the fact that it is "primarily neither a product of scholastic and theological learning nor a philosophical reflection on the general moral problems of his time," but "a fruit of his own inner struggle." 4 T h e study in hand seeks to reunite Edwards the theologian and Edwards the philosopher by locating the principle of correlation in his doctrine of immediacy. His emphasis on religious immediacy can do much to help remove the deistic leftovers in current rationalistic theism—liberalist and fundamentalist alike. Although this unifying idea was not divorced, in Edwards' mind, from the prevailing Calvinist-Puritan doctrines, it represents an innovation in eighteenth-century Calvinism. If this mystical strain in his thought and experience is taken seriously it must be adjudged that his imprecatory sermons are not necessarily integral to his philosophy, but may simply reflect the mindset of colonial New England. In any case it is as much a mistake to prejudge a man's thought on the basis of a few sermons he delivered as it is to attempt to evaluate those sermons apart from the intellectual climate in which they were delivered. In this respect history has dealt unjustly with Jonathan Edwards. This book is one attempt to help restore his reputation for intellectual integrity. T h e principles herein discussed do not stand or fall with Puritan

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EDWARDS AND T H E THIRD WAY

doctrines of reprobation and eternal punishment. On these points Edwards must be seen as a child of his time. It is now fairly well known that Edwards was anything but a thundering revivalist. His biographer Ola Winslow has pointed out that he led his hearers to a sense of their need by simple, logical persuasion and with quiet voice and few gestures. Most of his sermons deal with the beauties of religion and of the Christian life. Here is a statement from his private notebooks which suggests that Edwards may have been more of a psychologist in the pulpit than he is given credit for being: In the more unthinking people, such as husbandmen and the common sort of people who are less used to much reasoning, God commonly works this conviction of sin by begetting in their minds a dreadful idea and notion of the punishment. In the more-knowing and thinking men, the Holy Spirit makes more use of rational deductions to convince them that 'tis worth their while to seek earnestly for salvation. 5

It is the considered judgment of Richard Niebuhr that Edwards' sermons on "hell-fire," placed in their proper setting, represent his intense awareness of the precariousness of life's poise, of the utter insecurity of men and of mankind which are at every moment as ready to plunge into the abyss of disintegration, barbarism, crime and the war of all against all, as to advance toward harmony and integration. He recognized what Kierkegaard meant when he described life as treading water with ten thousand fathoms beneath us.6

T h e period in which he lived was characterized, in his own words, by the "decay of vital piety." 7 T h e language and methods of an earlier day were retained, but there were few traces of new vigor or growth. "The right to

EDWARDS AND T H E T H I R D

WAY

5

achitve salvation seemed a natural corollary to the right to win social distinction." 8 T h e Mather tradition had had a stagnating effect upon the younger generation. There was mors emphasis upon the cultivation of morality as a means to a Christian life than upon the need of a divinely wrought change in the inward man. Samuel Eliot Morison summarized seventeenth9

ent of this world, but a dimension of reality that underlies and penetrates all other dimensions. Some have called it the Unconditioned (das Unbedingte) which is always present in the inner depth of the conditioned in our experience, and not in the height of the stratosphere, as theists often imply; it lies behind and underneath rather than spatially above and beyond. Our awareness of the presence of the Unconditioned is given together with our awareness of our own being as conditioned. Because the term "supernatural" came to mean, in the nineteenth century, the preternatural, Karl Heim, for instance, prefers the term "suprapolar," and Reinhold Niebuhr the "super-historical." Whatever term we use is inadequate to express the paradox of "the immanence of the transcendent." We are challenged from many quarters today to clarify what we mean concerning the relation of God to the world: What is meant when it is said that God is "outside nature"? We cannot mean spatially outside, as outside a box; for the realm of space relates to nature herself. . . . In general, a supernaturalistic philosophy must reply positively to the foregoing queries. If it contents itself with saying that such-and-such is not what it means, without saying what it does mean, it will never give a satisfactory account of the relation between a natural and a supernatural realm. 19

Philosopher Charles Hartshorne has seen the logical fallacy in both traditional views. He points out that in any system of thought where God and the world are seen to be two entirely separate entities, as in abstract theism, God is perforce reduced to a constituent of a whole that is greater than himself. T h e "whole" is God-and-the-world. T h e pantheist alternative is no better because here God is reduced to a name for an impersonal world whole and thus his free-

20

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN GOD

dom is lost. In both positions the "whole" is more inclusive than God and thus his absoluteness is called into question. A third alternative must be found. Suppose that the divine knowing is indeed a self-inclosed reality (like Aristotle's self-inclosed deity), with the known entities outside it; we then have a total reality, God-and-World, which is more inclusive than either, and of which God is one constituent and World the other. If it is held an impiety that God should have constituents, what about the more obvious impiety that he should be a mere constituent? 2 0 Traditionally two main pictures have been drawn to represent God's relation to the world. Theism usually pictures the relation as one of spatial separation, as two mutually exclusive circles—the one representing the world, the other God. According to this view God is not the all-encompassing reality, but instead is reduced to a part of a larger whole which is more inclusive than Himself. T h e essential truth here is that God in his individuality—that without which he would not be God—must be logically independent of the world he has made. T h e problem with this view is that it does not explain how, if God is entirely separate from the world, he can at the same time be active in the world in any intelligible sense. T h i s weakness may imply that deism was, after all, the only logical conclusion from the premises of traditional, abstract theism. Pantheism, the other traditional view, usually pictures the world and God in terms of coextensive circles—mutually inclusive, but also indistinguishable. T h e r e is no distinction between the finite whole and the infinite ground. God is but a name for an impersonal world whole. His individuality is lost. In both traditional views the larger whole is a wider con-

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN GOD

21

cept than God. Yet, in order to be ultimate God must be infinitely inclusive. Edwards recognizes this when he says: "An infinite being . . . must be an all-comprehending being. He must comprehend in himself all being." Again, "If there be something more, then there is something beyond. And wherein this being doesn't reach and include that which is beyond, therein it is limited—its bounds stop short of this that is not comprehended." 2 1 Both traditional views are inadequate and even religiously dangerous. The one separates God from the world; the other identifies God with the world. Yet we must combine the essential point of the distinctness of God from the world (theism) with the equally necessary point of the unity of God with the world (pantheism) if we would arrive at a fully Christian understanding of this relation. A third and more adequate way of describing the relation is possible. In the context and idiom of his own century Edwards too was grasping for a third alternative that would do justice on the one hand to God's all-comprehensiveness and, on the other, to His creative presence in the world: God, in his benevolence to his creatures, cannot have his heart enlarged in such a manner as to take in beings that he finds, who are originally out of himself, distinct and independent. [He enlarges himself] by communicating and diffusing himself; . . . not by taking into himself what he finds distinct from himself . . . but by flowing forth, and expressing himself in them, and making them to partake of him. 2 2

The third way in theology describes the relation in terms of concentric circles—the outer circle representing God in his all-inclusiveness, the inner circle symbolizing the world. Edwards, who is careful to distinguish the "fullness" of

22

MAJESTY AND IMMEDIACY IN GOD

God's being from His "essence," would say that the world is in God, if the outer circle can be taken to represent God in the fullness of his being. God includes the world, yet he is "infinitely more besides." He is the dynamic and creative center of the world—its inner depth—at once higher and deeper than anything he includes; or, as a nineteenth-century poet expresses it in a single stroke: Than all [He] holds, more deep, more high. 23

This third way places God and the world in a relationship of mutual immanence: God in the world and the world in God. T h e "world in God" is logically prior to "God in the world." It is the "infinitely more besides" that preserves the third view from pan-theism (God and the world coextensive) and introduces instead a pan-en-theism. God is united with his world and at the same time distinct from it in what has been called "ecstatic transcendence." God is like an atmosphere within which man "lives and moves and has his being." We can only see ourselves and all other finite beings against a background of infinite being. Though entirely included in the infinite circle of being, all entities are finite because none is independent of the total system of relations. None carries within itself its own power to be. Each participates, consciously or not, in the infinite background of being. Our experience of self-consciousness is inseparable, then, from our experience of being related to the organic whole of which we are a part. We derive our individuality from a participation in the moving center and creative unity of our being. God first enters our experience, then, in Edwards' thinking, not as an inference but as a presupposition. Because God is the ultimate source of all being, and at the same

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN GOD

23

time includes within himself every particular being, he can neither be a particular inherent in the process (naturalism) nor can he be abstracted from it (abstract theism). In all this he aligns himself historically with the Augustinian mystical-realist strain in Christian thought, with its emphasis on the immediate awareness of esse-ipsum, and according to which, being is inseparable from its meaning. He recognizes the mediating factors of reason, nature, society, and history. His is a realistic concept of immediacy in which God enters directly into our consciousness "in, with, and under" (to use Luther's phrase describing consubstantiation) our total environment. Every particular being offers the observer a glimpse through to the Being that is eternal. Immediacy is not a union in which the mystic loses selfconsciousness; rather it is a living encounter with the eternal Presence that confronts us along the entire range of our daily, concrete experience. Looked at in this light, Edwards' philosophical position could be called "concrete theism" in contradistinction to the view that God's abstractness implies remoteness. This element of concreteness enables him to look upon the Christian experience of God as not so much a separate and extraordinary event as it is an "overtone" that is present potentially in every ordinary experience we have. An anonymous script writer has expressed this same idea by saying that "religion is not a way of looking at certain things, but a certain way of looking at all things." A British writer puts the matter succinctly: "We never experience the Divine sheerly in and by itself: we experience the Divine solely through and in connection with what is other than Divine." 2 4 Locke held that we can know ourselves by direct perception, and God only by inference—that is, by inferring from

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the fact of finite existence a first cause of existence and from thinking beings an eternal thinking being.25 As observed already in this chapter, Edwards acknowledges with Locke that the majority of mankind arrives at a knowledge of the being of God by inferential argument. But he goes beyond this limited view in maintaining that a knowledge of God by immediate awareness is open to any person who has the gift of spiritual vision and the intellectual discipline necessary to entertain such a unique intuition. 26 It calls for a spiritual metamorphosis, a crisis in the inner man, and once it comes to us it transforms every experience we have into a religious experience. T o maintain the vision requires intellectual discipline in coordinating the cognitive and aesthetic functions—that is, the understanding and appreciating powers—of the mind. The awareness is immediate, but the knowledge-content is mediated "in, with, and under" the "images or shadows of divine things." Thus, direct perception is the primary source of religious certainty. Rational argument is a useful but secondary function. Without a living experience of God there is no conclusive evidence of his reality. The "God" whose existence is "proved" by rational arguments is not really God. This was never more poignantly expressed than by Tillich: Arguments for the existence of God presuppose the loss of the certainty of God. That which I have to prove by argument has no immediate reality for me. Its reality is mediated for me by some other reality about which I cannot be in doubt, so that this other reality is nearer to me than the reality of God. For the more closely things are connected with our interior existence, the less are they open to doubt. And nothing can be nearer to us than that which is at times farthest away from us, namely God. A God who has been proved is neither near enough to us nor far enough away from us. He is not far enough, because of the very

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN COD

25

attempt we have made to prove Him. He is not near enough, because nearer things are presupposed by which the knowledge of Him is mediated. Hence this ostensibly demonstrated subject is not really God."

T h e affirmation of "the absolute, universally unconditional, necessity of God's being" 28 was Edwards' most fundamental assumption, and the philosophical basis of all his thinking. God is the unconditional Subject who can never be made into an ontological object. T h e presupposition of all experience can never become an inference from any particular experience. Reverence for Divine Being, all-inclusive and all-suffusive, in relation to whose infinity all else is infinitesimal, remained throughout his life the fundamental disposition of his mind. Without an understanding of this basic philosophy of being, the student of Edwards' thought reaches an impasse in any attempt to relate the many phases of his theophilosophic system. His concept of Being, while intentionally theoretical, is charged with meaning and value. Its religious content, in the reality of an immediate and creative spiritual Presence, gives wings to his thought, and one must look among the Hebrew Psalmists and Prophets for a devotional fervor comparable to his. At an astonishingly early age, this insight led him into what he called "a new World of Philosophy." 29 Edwards' mystical-realist conception of Being 3 0 and the impact of his theology on his philosophy kept him at a reasonably safe distance from the pantheistic notion of "universal necessity" (Spinoza). Little attempt has hitherto been made to understand the real thrust of the early notes precisely because critics have been too ready to dismiss them as a venture into pure pantheism, whether naturalistic or idealistic.31 "Being" according to Edwards "includes in it

26

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all that we call God, who is, and there is none else beside Him." 32 At times his terms are ambiguous and seem to suggest that "Being-in-general" is a concept more inclusive than God, of which God is merely the higher aspect, as in absolute idealism. A closer reading, however, shows that for him God is Being-itself in the dual sense of ultimate source and creative presence. By "Being-in-general" he means Unconditional Being. It is possible that Edwards borrowed this phrase from Malebranche, whose Search After Truth was published in England in 1694, and which Edwards enters and crosses out in the early pages of his "Catalogue of Books." In the above work, Malebranche uses the phrase "Being in general" and equates it with God. He defines it as representing the "clear, intimate and necessary presence of God" or "that presence of Being without any particular limitation" in contrast to finite beings that exist in a given place and time and condition. "It includes whatever is or whatever may be. Everything that exists proceeds from it." 38 This means that the creative power of being transcends at once every particular being and the totality of being. T h e whole point of Edwards' ontology is that God is not in being; being is in God. God does not have being; He is being. Any predication of being, he says, "is a supposition of the being of God; it not only presupposes it, but it implies it; it implies it not only consequentially but immediately." There is no being outside Divine Being, for "all things are in Him, and He in all." 34 Here we meet the sublime, poetic conception of God comprehending and fulfilling the infinite variety of the concrete world. Every predication of being presupposes and implies, consequentially and immediately, the all-com-

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN COD

27

prehending, universally unconditional, being of God. Here is the full context of a passage previously cited. Infinity and omneity, if I may so speak, must go together, because if any being falls short of omneity, then it is not infinite. Therein it is limited. Therein there is something that it doesn't extend to or that it doesn't comprehend. If there be something more, then there is something beyond. And wherein this being doesn't reach and include that which is beyond, therein it is limited—its bounds stop short of this that is not comprehended. An infinite being, therefore, must be an all-comprehending being. He must comprehend in himself all being. That there should be another being underived and independent, and so no way comprehended, will argue him not to be infinite, because then there is something more, there is more entity. 33

It is important to observe that Edwards' concept of Being is not an amorphous absolute such as one may find in British forms of absolute idealism. Being is not a mathematical quantity, as an extensionless point around which all content turns, but rather an essentially qualitative idea, arrived at a posteriori in that to be known it must be experienced; a priori in that, when experienced, it determines the very structure of being and meaning. God "comprehends all entity, and all excellence in His own essence. T h e First Being, the eternal and infinite Being, is, in effect, Being-in-general." 3 8 God is at once supreme Being and supreme Beauty since all being and all beauty are enfolded in his fullness. Being-itself "is that into which all excellency is to be resolved." 37 In fact, "Being, if we examine narrowly, is nothing but proportion." "Excellency" is a structural concept, that is, a form of ontological value, not merely ethical value, and therefore the basis of all aesthetic and ethical values. "God is all that is good and worthy in

28

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN GOD

the object, and the very being of the object, proceeding from the overflowing of His fulness." 38 It is clear that he shares the Augustinian conviction: Omne bonum est Deus aut ex Deo. Everything that is true or good or beautiful is so because it "implies consent and union to Being-in-general." 39 " A l l the beauty to be found diffused throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being" who is "infinitely the most beautiful and excellent." 40 For Edwards, as for Whitehead, beauty is a wider concept than either truth or goodness because spiritual beauty is the primary essence of God, who is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfecdy dependent; of whom and through whom, and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day. 41

Edwards cannot be linked with "the great chain of being" tradition in philosophy, as Arthur Lovejoy appears to do when he quotes him in support of the static theory of divine self-sufficiency.42 T h e error in this classification is that in the gradualist theory of being the absolute is understood as merely the highest in a scale of relative degrees of being, while in Edwards' view the very notion of "degrees" of being would be meaningless unless Being-itself were presupposed as the creative power-to-be that is present in every particular being, the power that resists and conquers nonbeing. T h e element of truth in Lovejoy's classification is that Edwards did hold to levels of being, 43 but God is the Reality that underlies and penetrates all levels.

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN GOD

29

Tillich has pointed out that "a theology which does not dare to identify God and the power of being as the first step toward a doctrine of God relapses into monarchic monotheism, for if God is not being-itself He is subordinate to it just as Zeus is subordinate to fate in Greek religion." 44 Edwards was a champion of ontological realism in the first half of the eighteenth century, holding as a first principle that the universe is unintelligible apart from its divine ground. God is present to all and to each in the sense that he is the inexhaustible Reality outside of which they cannot exist. In Edwards this mystical ontology must be seen in contrast to the rising tide of English deism with its antimystical rationalism. God is that without which everything that is would not be, without which everything beautiful would be destitute of beauty. It is clear that he does not mean, by "Being-ingeneral," all and every being, with God as merely one among many beings. God is neither the sum total of all beings nor even the summa summarum, but the creative unity in which every being participates, the Being of beings, ens entium, a knowledge of which involves a unique insight into the meaning of universal being. Edwards' God-as-Being-in-general is set over against the idea of Godas-a-mere-being-in-particular.45 In one of the later entries in the "Miscellanies" he quotes, apparently with approval, Philip Skelton as saying: " W e justly admire that saying of the philosopher that 'God is a being whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,' as one of the noblest and most exalted flights of human understanding." 4a T h e unity of being and goodness is an axiom of the Augustinian mystical-realist strain in the history of ideas. It is not known to what extent Edwards was acquainted

30

M A J E S T Y AND IMMEDIACY IN GOD

with Augustine or the writings of Christian Neoplatonists like Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, John Norris, and John Smith, but it is fairly certain that he could not have learned this from Locke or even Berkeley. Perhaps it can be attributed to the influence of Malebranche and the Cambridge Platonists upon Puritan thought in general.47 There is a noticeable difference in philosophical orientation between the Calvinism of Calvin and the neo-Calvinism of Edwards. The difference is not creedal but one of emphasis due to a different philosophical background. Every theologian is also a philosopher of sorts. Whitehead was right when he said that "Christianity has always been a religion seeking a metaphysics." 4 8 Calvin, probably under the influence of Roman Stoicism and the philosophy of Duns Scotus, emphasized absolute power,49 in terms of legal authority, as the foundation of goodness in God; Edwards, under the inspiration of Neoplatonism, stressed absolute beauty, as excellency, in the Being of God. Goodness is inherent in Being-itself and determines its structure. God is sovereign because he is good, not good because he is sovereign. This does not mean Edwards did not believe in the sovereignty of God, nor that Calvin did not believe the character of God influenced His will, but it is important to understand that the neo-Calvinism of Edwards marks a turning point away from an emphasis on the primacy of legal authority in the Being of God, and the unpredictability of an arbitrary will, toward an emphasis on the essential equation of being and beauty in God. God is not so much power-itself as he is love-itself. In creating a world he is moved not by a lust for power but by the power of love.50 God creates by fulfilling the inner law of his own being, which is love. The creation of religious virtue is the very

MAJESTY

AND I M M E D I A C Y

IN COD

3>

highest act of his creativity, and this virtue is primarily a species of divine beauty. Edwards' dynamic understanding of creation, as will be shown in Chapter Five, is a corollary of his fundamental concept of the immediacy of God. T h e primacy of aesthetic appreciation over moral submission in Edwards' personal response to God led him in a direction away from the naked worship of sheer power which has too often characterized the Calvinist. While there is, in Christianity, no necessary contradiction between love and authority in God, Calvin's disciples have too often stressed the legal and moral element at the expense of the aesthetic. the early essay on Being with the warning that "those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow" are making a "gross mistake," for "spirits only are properly substance." 6 1 Like his kindred spirit Bishop Berkeley, Edwards sought to counteract the materialistic tendencies he sensed in the disciples of Locke and Newton, especially as he saw these tendencies issuing in the deistic conceptions of natural law, mechanical cause, and material substance. Among the "things to be considered, or written fully about" in his prospectus on science he adds the note: " T o bring in an observation, somewhere in the proper place, that—instead of Hobbes' notion, that God is matter, and that all substance is matter—that nothing, that is matter, can possibly be God; and that no matter is, in the most proper sense, matter." 52 In a general view his college notes are suggestive of a synthesis, on a comprehensive scale, of philosophy, theology and science—a manifestly ambitious project which Edwards never found time to develop. Nevertheless, the ideal of such a synthesis underlies his later treatments of special probEDWARDS CONCLUDES

32

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lems. The design of his projected treatise which he tentatively called "A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion" was to "show how all the arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear as parts of it." 63 This was an ambitious attempt at a great synthesis of Christianity and culture, not too unlike that attempted by Aquinas in the thirteenth century, by Schleiermacher and Hegel in the nineteenth century, and again by Tillich in the twentieth.

III. BEYOND THEISM

God transcends creatures in the sense that nothing has power to exclude him, to set any boundaries to his being and power. He is absolutely free of every external restraint. In a peculiar and profound sense God is all-inclusive: there is nothing "outside" him, for had he any "outside" he would have limitations and would not be infinite. . . . If this can be shown, it will, on the one hand, entirely fulfill the mystic's intuition that God is "all in all" and that the universe is one with H i m . On the other hand, it will also account for the other aspect of his intuition, which is that individual things are not lost and obliterated in the unity of God but transfigured, seen as more perfectly and uniquely themselves. For if the unity of God is truly all-inclusive and non-dual, it must include diversity and distinction as well as one-ness; otherwise the principle of diversity would stand over against God as something opposite to and outside him. ALAN W . WATTS *

EDWARDS' COD is a l w a y s — t o u s e B a r t h ' s f a m o u s p h r a s e — " t h e

s u b j e c t o f t h e s e n t e n c e . " H e is t h e a l l - i n c l u s i v e a n d a l l - s u f f u s i v e R e a l i t y t h a t is p r e s e n t , i n d e p t h , i n e v e r y t h i n g t h a t l i v e s . I n E d w a r d s ' l a n g u a g e , G o d is "all t h a t is g o o d w o r t h y i n t h e o b j e c t , a n d t h e v e r y being

and

of the object, pro-

c e e d i n g f r o m t h e o v e r f l o w i n g of H i s fulness."

1

G o d is t h e

B e i n g in a l l b e i n g s j u s t b e c a u s e h e t r a n s c e n d s e v e r y p a r t i c u l a r b e i n g . B u t h e is n o t a D e i t y in absentia,

as t h e d e i s t s

i m a g i n e d , w h o stands o u t s i d e the w o r l d in lonely self-cont e m p l a t i o n ; H e is t h e l i v i n g , e v e r - p r e s e n t B e i n g - f o r - u s . F o r • Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity (New York, Pantheon, 1947), p. 142.

of Mystical

Religion

34

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Edwards, the principle of creativity in God is not solitary detachment and arbitrary fiat, but animating love and dynamic self-movement. As a twentieth-century writer expresses it, "God is a verb, not a noun!" 2 Among the "things to be considered or written fully about," introducing the early "Notes on Science," he lays down some of the first principles that controlled his thought on this subject. He writes of his intention in the projected treatise "to show how the motion, rest, and direction of the atom has an influence on the motion, rest, and direction of every body in the universe," and "to show how the least wrong step in a mote, may, in eternity, subvert the order of the universe." 3 From this we know that "Infinite Wisdom is as much concerned, not only in the excellent arrangement of the world, but in the simple creation of it, as Infinite Power." 4 T h a t this conviction—of the unity of the world of facts and forces in Divine Wisdom—remained constant throughout his life is evinced by a parallel passage in the treatise on freedom, written thirty-five years later. "It is possible," he writes, "that the most minute effects of the Creator's power, the smallest assignable difference between the things which God has made, may be attended, in the whole series of events, and the whole compass and extent of their influence, with very great and important consequences." 5 I think, it would be unreasonable to suppose, that God made one atom in vain, or without any end or motive. He made not one atom, but what was a work of his almighty power, as much as the whole globe of the earth, and requires as much of a constant exertion of almighty power to uphold it; and was made and is upheld understandingly, and on design, as much as if no other

BEYOND THEISM

35

had been made but that. And it would be as unreasonable to suppose, that he made it without any thing really aimed at in so doing, as much as to suppose, that He made the planet Jupiter without aim or design.8 From the macrocosm to the microcosm "the very being, and the manner of being, and the whole, of bodies depends immediately on the Divine Being." 7 Were God's influence withdrawn "the whole universe would in a moment vanish into nothing; so that not only the well-being of the world depends on it, but the very being." 8 There can be no real distinction, in Edwards' view, between originating, sustaining, and directing creativity, for all is conceived in terms of a creatio continna. Although the notion of continued creation has been variously held since Augustine, and was more or less accepted by the Reformers, Edwards gave it a more radical turn than it had received since the mystical realists of the late Middle Ages. While Augustine, for example, held that divine preservation of the world is immediate, and that the world would lapse into nothingness were his creative power withdrawn,9 even he did not dare to conclude in his later writings that the world was created, and is being created at every moment, by the effusion of Divine Being, but rested his case with creatio ex nihilo.10 Edwards' doctrine of creatio continua must be understood against the prevailing deistic way of understanding God as a Being-in-absentia. Vitally integral to his religious consciousness is the conviction that God is essentially creative, and consequently creative at every moment of temporal existence. The late discoveries and advances which have been made in "natural philosophy," Edwards observes, compel "all men of sense, who are

36

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also men of learning," to acknowledge "a present immediate operation of God on the creation." 11 Elsewhere he affirms that the "existence of created substances, in each successive moment, must be the effect of the immediate agency, will, and power of God." 12 The so-called established laws and settled course of nature, so often the deist's final court of appeal, are "nothing but the continued immediate efficiency of God, according to a constitution that he has been pleased to establish." 13 All matter is energized, and all energy is God's immediate creativity. All objects are therefore continuing events in time and space. Each person and thing, at each moment of its existence, is dependent on the "immediate continued creation of God." And it follows from this, as Edwards concludes, that "God's preserving created things in being is perfectly equivalent to a continued creation, or to his creating those things out of nothing at each moment of their existence." 14 If this be so, then what Augustine declared is true: "those things would drop into nothing, upon the ceasing of the present moment, without a new exertion of the Divine power to cause them to exist in the following moment." 15 That this idea was not alien to Puritan thought can be seen from the writings of a representative English Puritan, Richard Sibbes. "By a continued kind of creation," he wrote, "God preserves all things in their being and working." 16 In Edwards' day it was not enough to say, with theists, that God created the world ex nihilo, for the moderate deists could admit as much. It is important, however, to observe that creatio ex nihilo—a Christian doctrine which was formulated to counterbalance Plato's doctrine of the Demiurge—ought never to mean and should never have

BEYOND THEISM

37

meant that "nihility" is that out of which God created the world, but instead that God created the world out of "nothing outside himself." 17 Edwards asserts, in line with his twin doctrines of divine immediacy and divine self-communication, that God creates the world at each moment out of his own inexhaustible Being, operationes ad extra. He creates not by standing alongside, as it were, and suddenly deciding to make a world. He creates by fulfilling the laws of his own being, for he is essentially and immediately creative. This element of immediate creativity, which Edwards considered so essential to vital religion, he found wanting in the post-Restoration "Arminianism" of the Anglican Church, which was now infiltrating New England as the first phase of the theology of the Age of Reason. This Arminianism was sometimes allied with Latitudinarianism, more often with deism and moralism, even with Arianism, and still more often with Antinomianism and "Enthusiasm." In whatever form, it was to Edwards a signal of the trend toward nominalism and rationalism in religion. Letters to John Erskine of Edinburgh show Edwards inquiring again and again for advice concerning the best writings of the deists. Moderate and radical deists—ranging from John Locke to Matthew Tindal—found common ground in a distrust of mysticism in any form, and rationalistic Arminians shared their distrust. Arminian theology in the Church of England, following the restoration of the monarchy, was largely an attempt to provide a rational explanation of the relation of God to man, in reaction to the altogether incomprehensible God of the more rigid Calvinists. In the language of Perry Miller, it was soon perceived "that the basic error in Arminianism was not any

38

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one of its 'five points' formulated at Dort, but its exaltation of the human reason and consequently its reconstruction of God after the human image." 18 No two deists agreed, and they ranged from degrees of radical deism to varieties of moderate deism. Radicals like Tindal allowed God no interference whatever that might affect human life. John Toland was a disciple of Locke who made Locke say what Locke himself would never have said. From Locke's statement that there is nothing in religion that is "contrary to reason," Toland concluded that there is therefore nothing "above reason." It is a curious fact that Toland later switched to pantheism after Leibniz had accused him of worshiping the universe. Thomas Chubb's Short Dissertation on Providence is perhaps the best example of moderate deism, and resembles the main lines of thought taken up later by nineteenth century theists. He distinguishes "General Providence" from "Particular Providence," and remarks cautiously that the notion "that God should be frequently . . . interposing . . . is a supposition that is greatly unlikely." 1 9 Creatio continua, as Edwards conceived of it, is an "immediate production out of nothing, at each moment." Persons and things do not depend on their "antecedent existence," but they depend immediately on God, and the supposition that their "antecedent existence concurs with God in efficiency, to produce some part of the effect," is equally absurd. God continues the effect at each moment "as much from nothing, as if there had been nothing before. So that this effect differs not at all from the first creation, but only circumstantially." 20 In the "Miscellanies" Edwards had said: " 'Tis certain with me that the world exists anew every moment, that the existence of things every moment ceases

BEYOND THEISM

39

and is every moment renewed. . . . Indeed we every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have seen if we had seen Him create the world at first." 21 It follows from this that if the existence of created entities, in each successive moment, is wholly the effect of God's immediate power, in that moment, then "what exists at this moment, by this power, is a new effect, and simply and absolutely considered, not the same with any past existence, though it be like it, and follows it according to a certain established method." 2 2 Even our experience of continued personal identity, from moment to moment and from birth to death, is in reality the continued and immediate creative agency of God. This notion of creative immediacy is reminiscent of his mystical philosophy of Being in the college notes. There he asserted that "bodies have no substance of their own," for, "speaking most strictly, there is no proper substance but God Himself." 23 Even solidity, together with its modesextension, motion, and figure—is reducible to the infinite resistance of Divine Mind. "All body is nothing but what immediately results from the exercise of Divine Power," 24 so that "there is neither real substance, nor property, belonging to bodies; but all that is real is immediately in the First Being." 28 What Edwards is rejecting, as already intimated in Chapter II, is not the factuality of the external world, but the insensate, unthinking being supposed to be the immediate cause of our sensations—the "something we know not what" of Locke's Essay. Edwards nowhere denies the "out-thereness" of the sense world, but he is opposing the metaphysical dualism implied in the vague notion of an unintelligible, nonspiritual support, or substratum, of what we see. touch, hear, taste, or smell.

4°

BEYOND

THEISM

T h a t , which philosophers used to think a certain unknown substance, that subsists by itself, (called the Unknown Substratum), which stood underneath and kept up solidity, is nothing at all distinct from solidity itself; . . . if they must needs apply that word to something else, that does really and properly subsist by itself, and support all properties, they must apply it to the Divine Being or Power itself. And here I believe all these philosophers would apply it, if they knew what they meant themselves. So that the substance of bodies at last becomes either nothing, o r nothing but the Deity, acting in that particular manner, in those parts of space where he thinks fit: so that, speaking most strictly, there is no proper substance but God Himself. 2 6

With or without Berkeley, Edwards applied to "primary qualities" the same critique Locke had applied to "secondary properties," rejecting the inert, senseless substance in which they were said to subsist. Malebranche's vision of "all things in God" and Newton's "divine sensorium" were, of course, common to Edwards and Berkeley alike. Newton was persuaded that God, being omnipresent, perceives objects immediately without requiring the mediation of external senses, the peculiar limitation of finite beings. 27 Thus infinite space is God's "sensorium" and all objects exist in divine consciousness. In Malebranche and Newton are fertile suggestions of a sort of panentheism, in which God interpenetrates all things without canceling or impugning the relative individuality of created entities. Edwards perceived the religious implications of this idea and began to construct a philosophic system on its foundation. While Henry More and Ralph Cudworth followed a not-too-dissimilar line of thought by identifying the Christian God with the Neoplatonic World-Soul, Newton rejected this analogy and asserted that the world is to God as a species in the human sensorium is to man. 2 8 Although Edwards often employed

BEYOND T H E I S M

41

Neoplatonic terminology, he preferred Newton's Infinite Space to Cudworth's World-Soul as carrying less materialistic implications. For the rest of his life he toyed with the concept of a Divine Being, as pure Idea, who is the all-inclusive and underlying Reality within which all finite beings are grounded and comprehended, as opposed to the illicit dualism of spiritual force and material substance. "Space is God," he could confidently affirm in his private notes, for God is pure Idea and all-enfolding Reality.29 Here he is using our experience of space, as a phenomenon with which we are everywhere immediately and continuously confronted, as the closest experiential analogy to the idea of the mystical presence of God. A useful parallel can be drawn at this point with the "suprapolar space" concept of Karl Heim. As polar space is the objective space-world in which we exist, so also we live in a spatial dimension that is "nonobjective." W e are all at every moment situated simultaneously in all the spaces which together constitute the "universe of spaces" (das All der Raiime); for whenever there is disclosed to us the existence of a space which had previously been concealed from us, we know from the very first moment that this space has not just come into being, b u t that it had always surrounded us without our noticing it . . . the final and decisive space-discovery [is] the realization that, while we are encompassed on all sides by the temporal world, we stand at the same time even now in the midst of eternity and are enclosed within the archetypal space (Urraum) of God. . . . So long as we have not become aware that the presence of God is a space, encompassing the whole of reality just as the three-dimensional space does, so long, that is to say, as we can conceive the world of God only as the u p p e r story of the cosmic space, so long will God's activity, too, always be a force which effects earthly events only from above. . . . the presence of God is not an u p p e r story of the one cosmic space, but a sepa-

42

BEYOND THEISM

rate all-ambracing space by itself, so that the polar and the suprapolar worlds do not stand with respect to one another in the same relation as two floors of the same house but in the relation of two spaces. . . . in two spaces one and the same reality may be ordered simultaneously in accordance with two entirely different structural laws. One and the same occurrence in the world may manifest itself to us in two different aspects. 30

Heim is concerned that we outgrow the mythological spacepicture of the primitives which scientists outgrew decades ago and that we learn to think in terms of the multidimensional space-world which relativity mechanics and astrophysics have disclosed to us. "Space" is the only adequate metaphor to express the presence of the inescapable God of Hebrew-Christian thought. T h e fact is that reality is much richer, deeper, and more mysterious than we had supposed. Even the objective space we are able to explore with the telescope and the microscope is only one among many possible aspects. It is now possible to conceive of a multiplicity of spaces, all differing in their curvature. A n d this leads us philosophically to the idea that the objective world "is not the whole of reality but is only one space into which everything is fitted. There exists simultaneously a second space which, together with the whole reality, we traverse at every instant and which surrounds us from all sides just as the space of objectivity does." 3 1 Newton's idea of three-dimensional space as God's "sensorium," plus his law of universal gravitation which seemed to unite the terrestrial and celestial worlds under a single formula, gave philosophical basis to Edwards' conclusion that "space is God." T h e cosmological implications of Newton's theory, though based on Euclidean geometry, were revolutionary. Space was believed to be homogeneous, with

BEYOND THEISM

43

no center and therefore no circumference, infinite in extent. Heim's concept of suprapolar space is developed out of a knowledge of Einstein's relativity mechanics according to which objective space is heterogeneous and therefore finite. All parallel lines eventually intersect. Objective space has a circumference, however immeasurable by existing instruments. But Heim goes beyond the Einstein theory in positing an eternal and infinite space-dimension which is creatively present at every point of the objective space-world. And the contention is that this position is more tenable under the new geometry and physics than it could possibly have been in the thought-world of the eighteenth century. IN EDWARDS' early notes we have a full statement of his mature theory of immediate creativity: Since Body is nothing but an infinite resistance, in some parts of space, caused by the immediate exercise of Divine Power; it follows, that as great and as wonderful power is every moment exerting in the upholding of the world, as at first was exerted in its creation: the first creation being only the first exertion of this power, to cause such resistance, and the preservation, only the continuation of the repetition of this power every moment to cause this resistance; so that the universe is created out of nothing every moment. 3 2

This dynamic conception of creation as creativity was already, for him, an absorbing thought. Whence we may learn, he adds, "who it is that sustains this noble fabrick of glorious bodies—and to expatiate much upon it."

33

This creative immediacy depends on Divine Wisdom uniting "these successive new effects." T h e whole course of nature, with its laws and methods, its constancy and regularity, continuance and proceeding, beauty and symmetry, is a

44

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constitution of God's wisdom. T h e "continuance of the very being of the world and all its parts, as well as the manner of continued being," depends entirely on this coherence of reality in the mind of God. 34 For it does not at all necessarily follow, that because there was sound, or light or color, or resistance, or gravity, or thought, or consciousness, or any other dependent thing the last moment, that therefore there shall be the like at the next. All dependent existence whatsoever is in a constant flux, ever passing and returning; renewed every moment, as the colors of the bodies are every moment renewed by the light that shines upon them; and from God, as light from the sun. "In all is constantly proceeding Him we live and move, and have our being!" 3 5

While the second law of thermodynamics indicates that a process of disintegration will lead eventually to the total disorganization of the universe, more recently scientists have concluded that this law accounts for only one of the forces at work in the universe and that this force is counterbalanced by a creative process. A theory known as relativistic thermodynamics has been developed to account for this balance of forces. T h e observation of cosmic radiation and of the complexity of star energy has led to the view that the universe is pulsating, that is, continually expanding and contracting. Or, as Edwards could say, "all dependent existence whatsoever is in a constant flux, ever passing and returning, renewed every moment." Here Edwards joins his forces with Cudworth, Malebranche, and the theologian Mastricht in their opposition to the Cartesian notion of an unmoved Mover originally starting the world in motion and then observing its movement at a remote distance—a view popularized by the deists—and affirms, in contradis-

BEYOND THEISM

45

tinction, the idea of God himself acting in all things immediately.39 "Why should not He that made all things," Edwards inquires with passionate concern, "still have something immediately to do with the things he has made? Where lies the difficulty, if we own the being of a God, and that he created all things out of nothing, of allowing some immediate influence of God on the creation still?" 37 If there be a God who is truly an intelligent, voluntary active being, what is there in reason to incline us to think that He should not act, and that He should not act upon his creatures, which, being his creatures, must have their very being from His actions, and must be perfectly and most absolutely subject to and dependent on His action? And if He acted once, why must He needs be still forever after and act no more? What is there in nature to disincline us to suppose He may not continue to act towards the world He made? And if under His government, and if He continues to act at all towards His creatures, then there must be some of His creatures he continues to act upon immediately. 38

In the spirit of Biblical thought, the motion and change of the temporal process do not stand in opposition to a divine inertia. God is in the process by a continued and immediate creativity. Although Edwards did not live to develop the full implications of his doctrine of creative immediacy for a philosophy of history, his History of the Work of Redemption asserts the view that history can have meaning only if it have a center. Christ is the center of history and in him is to be found its principle of meaning.39 In this sense it is one of the earliest modern attempts at relating Heilsgeschichte, or sacred history, to calendar history.40 Although he did not live to complete the project, it evinces a keen historical sense and is significant from the standpoint

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of methodology.41 In a letter to the trustees of Princeton he describes the scheme of the projected treatise in terms of historical-biblical theology. I have had on my mind and heart (which I long ago began, not with any view to publication), a great work, which I call a History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of a history; considering the affair of Christian Theology, as the whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption by Jesus Christ; which I suppose to be, of all others, the grand design of God, and the summum ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees; particularly considering all parts of the grand scheme in their historical order. . . . This method appears to me the most beautiful and entertaining, wherein every divine doctrine will appear to the greatest advantage in the brightest light, in the most striking manner, showing the admirable contexture and harmony of the whole.*2

All events are viewed sub specie aeternitatis. Christ, the personal Wisdom of God, is the telos of history. "It is with God's work of providence, as it is with his work of creation; it is but one work." 4 3 All the revolutions of time, from the beginning of the world to the end, are but the various parts of the same grand design, "all conspiring to pass that great event which the great Creator and Governor of the world has ultimately in view." 4 4 The Bible is significant, he continues, because it is the only book in the world that pretends to show us "the connection of the various parts of the work of providence, and how all harmonizes, and is connected together in a regular, beautiful, and glorious frame." 4 5 Redemptive history is the center and goal of all history, being "the principal of all God's works of providence," and to which all the works of providence are reducible. "We see that all the revolutions

BEYOND THEISM

47

in the world are to subserve this grand design; so that the work of redemption is, as it were, the sum of God's works of providence." 48 But "if we behold the events of providence in any other view, it will all look like confusion, like a number of jumbled events coming to pass without any order or method, like the tossings of the waves of the sea; things will look as though one confused revolution came to pass after another; merely by blind chance, without any regular or certain end." 47 Without a center history has no telos and no meaning. Because Christ is the eternal center of reference toward which all past time points and back to which all future time looks He is the ever-present Christ, the Logos of history. "If we seriously consider the course of things from the beginning, and observe the motions of all the great wheels of Providence from one age to another," he concludes, "we shall discern that they all tend hither. They are all as so many lines, whose course, if it be observed and accurately followed, it will be found that every one centres here." 48 it folly in the disciples of Locke to search for some "unknown substance that subsists by itself," underlying the properties of bodies;49 he likewise observed in the followers of Newton "the folly of seeking for a mechanical cause of gravity." 80 Newton had introduced Edwards to a law-ordered universe, but the Newtonians, unlike Newton, conceived of law as a fixed principle established as a permanent characteristic of nature. 51 This was compatible with the deistic notion of "natural law." But Edwards' doctrine of immediate divine agency precludes the possibility of natural law as the deists conceived it. He was not rejecting science, but he sensed the disastrous effect of EDWAROS HAD DECLARED

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the lack of philosophic orientation in the discoveries and principles of Newtonian physics. For this reason he emphasized that "the constant exertion of the infinite power of God is necessary to preserve bodies in being." 52 He fully recognized that "the law of creating" is "constant and regular." 53 But it is indispensable to philosophy that "the established constitution and course of nature" be seen as "nothing separate from the agency of God," for—and here he paraphrases John Taylor—"God, the Original of all being, is the only cause of all natural effects." 54 T h e "established laws of nature" are "nothing but the continued immediate efficiency of God." 85 God's creative activity is more or less complex, according to the level of excellence in the scale of being. T h e creative being of God interpenetrates the whole universe, not unlike the force of gravity as it interpenetrates the electromagnetic field. 'Tis exceeding evident in natural philosophy that all the operations of the creatures are the immediate influence of the Divine Being; and that the method of influence is most simple, constant, and unvaried in the meanest and simplest beings, and more evident, compounded, and various and according to less simple rules in beings that are more perfect and compounded—and that in proportion as they are more or less perfect. 'Tis most simple in inanimate beings, less so in plants, more compounded still in the more-perfect plants, more evident in animals than in them, and most so in the most perfect animal and most-compounded and least of all bound to constant laws—in man. And 'tis certainly beautiful that it should be so—that in the various ranks of beings those that are nearest to the first being should most evidently and variously partake of his influence; and 'tw'd be no more than just to make out the proportion, if the soul of man be influenced by the operation of the Spirit of God, as the Scripture represents. 56

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The notions of mechanical causation and the uniformity of natural law had been vigorously defended by Descartes, Spinoza, Francis Bacon, and others. Newton, following Kepler and Galileo, raised them to the rank of a scientific axiom through his theory of universal gravitation operating according to a fixed formula. The revolutionary impact of this theory upon philosophy is clearly described by A. G. Ramsperger: T h e discovery of the law of gravitation by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was the master stroke that seemed to be the final word on the mechanics of nature. According to this law, every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force which is proportional to the product of the masses of the particles in question and inversely as the square of the distance between them. There is perhaps no other law which expresses in one simple statement such an apparent diversity of behavior. We say apparent diversity because it is precisely the merit of the law that it shows the fall of an apple and the rising of the ocean tides, the path of a cannon ball and the movement of the moon, all to be instances of the same principle, namely, the attraction of matter for other matter. It explains why the direction toward the center of the earth always seems downward whether one is standing in New York or Australia; it accounts for the velocities and paths of the planets which Kepler had described in his three laws of planetary motion. No wonder that men thought they were nearing the goal of a complete understanding of nature. Newton seemed to have guessed the key to God's plan of the world. Given a world of matter distributed and moving in a certain way at one time, the laws of motion a n d of gravitational force would enable a super-mathematician to calculate how that matter would be distributed in a year, or a thousand years, hence. 57

While this marked an advance in experimental science, it had disastrous consequences outside the domain of pure

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science. God was pushed to the periphery of the knowable universe and relegated to the beginning of the temporal process. Isaac Newton himself, however, definitely stated in his Principia that the behavior of the heavenly bodies in the solar system required God to impose the principles on which the system depended. As A. C. McGiffert, Sr., expressed it, "Newton still thought divine interference occasionally necessary to correct observed irregularities" in the movement of the heavenly bodies, "but later it was shown that such irregularities corrected themselves." 58 T h u s the deistic view of God arose. T h e n came the classical period of "Christian apologetics" in which an attempt was made to demonstrate the truth of Christianity entirely by appeal to prophecy and miracle, supernatural phenomena which were intended to give the Christian faith the support of divine authority. T h e writings of John Locke and Samuel Clarke gave weight to this claim. This marked the virtual collapse of every attempt to maintain a religious Lebensanschauung. T h e new scientism ruled out the immediate activity of God in the world. "Supernatural" was taken by naturalists to mean anti-natural, while the rejection of creatio continua by supernaturalists led, in time, to antisupernaturalism, and the fate of Christianity was made to rest upon a rationalistic argument for the supernatural character of miracles. In William Paley's hands the "supernatural" meant the extraordinary. In Gottfried Leibniz and Joseph Butler it came to mean simply a "higher law" of nature. In historical perspective the similarities between the deists and the apologists are more striking than are their differences. T h e reader will recall Ben Franklin's remark in his Autobiography to the effect that he was converted to deism

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by reading the antideist writings. These apologists were the theoretical theists of Edwards' day. 69 It must be admitted that there are places where Edwards sounds like any other eighteenth-century apologist. A curious example of the century's trend in theological debate is the fact that the only entries from his journal "Miscellanies" which were considered worthy of publication were those which appealed t o miracle and prophecy in support of Christianity. Yet this important journal of Edwards' contains 1,360 separate entries. This means that much of his best writing has for two centuries remained hidden in barely legible manuscripts. 80 The chief problem of the eighteenth century became one of relocating God in a post-Newtonian universe. The medieval world-picture, within which scholastics and reformers had labored, collapsed under the weight of the new physics and astronomy. How could the Reformation doctrine of God-transcendent remain anything more than a frame without the picture? Sensing the trend more keenly than his contemporaries, Edwards saw that if we consign God to the remote edge of the universe, and thus dispense with His immediate influence, we open the floodgates to ultimate irrationalism. As we know now, the second half of the eighteenth century raised the final question, namely, that if the universe could sustain itself, then perhaps it could also originate itself. God was no longer thought to be a living presence with whom we are immediately and intimately confronted; he was a mere inference from the natural order of mechanical causes. " "Tis a strange disposition that men have," writes Edwards, "to thrust God out of the world, or to put Him as far out of sight as they can, and to have in no respect immediately and sensibly to do with Him. Therefore so many schemes have been drawn to exclude, or ex-

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tenuate, or remove at a great distance, any influence of the Divine Being." 8 1 He defines the "Laws of Nature" as "the stated methods of God's acting with respect to bodies." "Hence we learn," he adds, "that there is no such thing as Mechanism; if that word is intended to denote that whereby bodies act, each upon the other, purely and properly by themselves." 82 As he saw it, the deistic orientation did not necessarily follow from Newton's theory of undeviating sequences in nature. Another philosophic orientation was possible. This is what he undertook in his uncompleted Summa, which was designed "to show how all the arts and sciences issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear as parts of it." I am persuaded that Edwards, in the context of his time, •was moving in the right direction. For, in more recent times, we have witnessed the shaking of the foundations of the self-sufficient universe. No longer can we think of nature as a mere system of calculable laws resting in themselves without beginning or end. In a world where man is threatened with meaninglessness the very questions of "beginning" and "end" have become once again theoretically significant, and extraordinarily urgent. AS A STUDENT of Locke and Newton, Edwards saw at once that empiricists and naturalists were jumping to conclusions which neither Locke nor Newton would have drawn. He sensed a trend toward naturalistic religion in "the reasonableness of Christianity" and the belief in "necessary connections." He rejected both natural law and mechanical •causation, reducing all causation to the "continued immediate efficiency" of God in creation. It is the being, not merely the will, of God that is the universal and immediate

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Cause. Thomists and deists alike conceived of science as dealing with secondary causes and religion as concerned w i t h primary causes. Even Calvin distinguished " p r o x i m a t e " from "ultimate" causes. 63 Edwards had no room in his m i n d for the notion of a "secondary cause." " T h e only reason we are ready to object against the absolute, universally unconditional, necessity of God's being," he wrote in an early essay, "is, that we are ready to conceive as if there were some second cause."

64

The reason why it is so exceedingly natural to men to suppose that there is some Latent Substance, or Something that is altogether hid, that upholds the properties of bodies is, because all see at first sight, that the properties of bodies are such as require some Cause, that shall every moment have influence to their continuance, as well as a Cause of their first existence.85 W h a t some call a chain of secondary causes and their effects is, to Edwards, nothing different from our experience of the impact of events before and after, antecedent and subsequent. A p a r t from their prior connection in the mind of God, there is n o inherently necessary connection between what follows and what goes before. In some respects, at least, he shares Hume's critique of secondary causes, although he would also have agreed with K a n t that H u m e overlooked the fact that the notion of objective causality is presupposed even in our subjective experience of the succession of events. L i k e Hume, Edwards sensed the abyss of infinite regression when causality is made to depend on the supposed necessary connection of a given cause with its effect. Unlike Hume, he would not have denied an objective rational basis for causality, which he discovered in the wisdom of G o d and His continued immediate creativity in the world. T o Hume, causality was a

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mere feeling of expectation, induced by the frequent repetition of a sequence of events. Edwards is closer to Kant in showing that unless the principle of causality is presupposed, even the knowledge involved in our everyday experience would be impossible. An objective order of causality, which he equated with the pattern of events in the mind of God, is implied in every actual experience. Georges Lyon expresses Edwards' position succinctly: "Comment l'expérience engendrerait-elle le concept sans lequel il ne saurait y avoir d'expérience?" 6 6 Though our reasoning is dependent upon the observable logical relations of phenomena, this itself presupposes an objective causal relation in the mind of God. God embraces all antecedents and their subséquents within his own comprehensive being. He is antecedent to all beings, yet present in each being. W e must understand causality in ontological terms. Edwards was consciously opposing the deistic notion of a First Cause operating at a remote distance from its effects. A. N. Whitehead remarks humorously that in the eighteenth century "God made his appearance in religion under the frigid title of the First Cause, and was appropriately worshipped in whitewashed churches." 6 7 In Edwards' concept he seems to be relating symbolically the categories of "substance" and "causality." " T h e course of nature," he maintains, "is no proper active cause, which will work and go on by itself without God," as the deists purported, for "separate from the agency of God it is nothing." 6 8 T h i s whole argument of God's present agency in creation is drawn out painstakingly in a lengthy entry from the manuscript "Miscellanies," edited for the first time by H. G. Townsend.

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'Tis nonsense to say God acts upon all [creatures] mediately, because in so doing we go back in infinitum from one thing acting on another without ever coming to a primary, present agent, and yet at the same time suppose God to be such a present agent. Thus let us proceed which way we will in the series of things in the creation, still the higher we ascend and the nearer we come to God in the gradation or succession of created things, the nearer it comes to this, that there is no other law than only the law of infinite wisdom of the omniscient first cause and supreme disposer of all things, who in one simple, unchangeable, perpetual action comprehends all existence in its utmost compass and extent and infinite series.69 He was grasping always for a concept that would transcend, comprehend and unite the commonplace categories of causality and substance. This he found in his basic idea of Being as the creative source of life, which is present, in depth, in everything that lives. God transcends both causality and substance, while yet being the essential substance and the efficient cause of all things. As already intimated, the question of the cause of a thing implies, by definition, that no individual entity possesses its own power-to-be. God alone is his own power-to-be. Thus He is more than a prima causa, in Aristotle's phrase; He is the sole originative Being, the una vera causa of Malebranche. A highest being would still be faced with the question of its cause; a first cause would have to search beyond itself for its power-to-be. Tillich analyzes the problem in this way: Causality expresses by implication the inability of anything to rest on itself. Everything is driven beyond itself to its cause, and the cause is driven beyond itself to its cause, and so on indefinitely. . . . The fact that man is causally determined makes his being contingent with respect to himself. The anxiety in which

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he is aware of this situation is anxiety about the lack of necessity of his being. . . . This is exactly the anxiety implied in the awareness of causality as a category of finitude.70

Causality, considered by itself, makes the world ultimately dependent on God, but also separates God from the world as a cause is separated from its effect. On the other hand, substance, considered separately, tends to bring God into a vital, immediately creative, relation to the world, while at the same time it tends to make God dependent on the world. What actually happened in the subtlety of the causal argument, as the deists employed it, was that God was drawn into the series as a cause and then reduced to an effect—since cause and effect logically include each other— thus being driven beyond Himself in search of his own power-to-be. Edwards' God is neither a cause which, as in deism, stands at a remote distance from the effect, nor a substance which, as in Spinoza, is coextensive with the world of objects. His employment of what Tillich calls a "symbolic use" of substance and causality enabled him to overcome both naturalistic pantheism and rationalistic theism. 71 It marks a rejection at once of mechanical cause, natural law, and material substance. Divine Being is essentially originative and expansive, but at the same time unconditionally free in self-communication. T h e being of God interpenetrates the universe, recreating it in each new moment, yet without canceling the relative and dependent individuality of the creature. In terms of experience, individuality consists in the degree and manner of our participation in God, without whom we would not be at all. Although Edwards often employed empirical arguments against the deists and Arminians, he never became a thor-

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oughgoing empiricist. His conviction that God must be experienced to be known does not, I think, constitute radical empiricism. He proves that one can be a severe critic of uncontrolled empiricism without discrediting the importance of the empirical factor. The place he gives to the category of causality and its relation to the still more fundamental principle of Being precludes an unqualified acceptance of the radical empiricist thesis that all knowledge is derived from experience: nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. Edwards' interpreters often have been baffled at the apparent ease with which he passes from deductive to inductive reasoning, and back again, and from the category of substance to that of causality, and vice versa. He used whatever method best suited his purpose at the moment, and the reader must not confuse his methodology with epistemology. Neither can Edwards justly be accused of pantheism if by this is meant "God minus universe equals zero." Yet he did not fear to acknowledge, in opposition to the abstract and nonmystical theism of his contemporaries, the essentially Christian element of truth in the assertion that "God is all." 72 He affirmed with equal emphasis, however, the infinite distinction, in "degree and manner of being," between God and the world of refulgences that reflect his glory. In Edwards we find a delicate balance of traditional theistic and classical pantheistic elements, which can only be called a variety of panentheism or mystical realism. T h e term "panentheism" was coined by the German idealist, Karl C. F. Krause (1781-1832), as a possible solution to the problem of balancing the absolute "otherness" of God with the experience of His all-pervading presence. By viewing "all things in God" one is able to hold the two logical poles

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in creative tension. One form of the doctrine is represented in the personalism of Martin Buber when he says: " T o look away from the world or to stare at it does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in God stands in His presence." 7 3 Calvin's system of thought was primarily a philosophy of causality, while Edwards' was mainly a philosophy of being. T h e followers of Calvin, in order to overcome his emphasis on divine incomprehensibility, formulated the doctrines of God and of the ethical life in terms compatible with "natural law." Edwards, on the other hand, sought to place the whole system of Calvin on more of an ontological foundation, conceiving of God most fundamentally not as absolute W i l l but as unconditional Being. This means that, while the two ideas—Will and Being—do not exclude each other, the emphasis on divine decree is static and frigid alongside the more dynamic and passionate conception of divine selfmovement. God does not simply declare something to be, and thus it becomes. He expresses himself in outgoing movement, as in the Genesis story of creation: " T h e Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters." God does not merely cause light to be; he emits light. Creation is not out of nothing qua nothing, but out of the inexhaustible depths of God's infinity. Against the pantheists Calvin had asserted that "to divide the essence of the Creator, that every creature may possess a part of it, indicates extreme madness. Creation is not a transfusion, but an origination of existence from nothing." 7 4 It is evident that Calvin does not appreciate the element of truth in pantheism essential to a Christian doctrine of God. 7 5 He is equally vehement, however, in decrying the Stoic notion of inherent causality. We do not, with

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the Stoics, "imagine a necessity arising from a perpetual concatenation and intricate series of causes, contained in nature; but we make God the Arbiter and Governor of all things, who, in his own wisdom, has, from the remotest eternity, decreed what he would do, and now, by his own power, executes what he has decreed." 76 While Edwards would, of course, welcome this rejection of inherent causality, the supposed distance between the divine decree and its execution is foreign to his dynamic concept of creative immediacy. Calvin's statement implies an artificial distinction between creation and providence, which in deism became an absolute contrariety. Following Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century, the dcctrine of creation was reduced mainly to a question of origins; the vital and immediate relationship between Creator and creature was obscured. Providence came to be understood by both the deists and their opponents—the Christian theists—exclusively in terms of natural law and secondary causes. Edwards, in reaction to the eighteenthcentury trend toward mediating positions, perceived that a God who is not everywhere and at every moment immediately and creatively present in the world is not the God of Christian experience. This conviction led him to conclude that the whole universe, including all creatures, animate and inanimate, in all its actings, proceedings, revolutions, and entire series of events, should proceed from a regard and with a view, to God, as the supreme and last end of all; that every wheel, both great and small, in all its rotations, should move with a constant, invariable regard to Him as the ultimate end of all; as perfectly and uniformly, as if the whole system were animated and directed by one common soul; or, as if one possessed of perfect wisdom and rectitude, became the common soul of the universe, and actuated and governed it in all its motions. 77

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T h e prevailing orthodox doctrine of temporal creation by divine fiat offered a satisfying solution to the problem of the individuality of created beings. But at the same time it posited a unilateral relation between God and his creation, viz., while the world stands related to God as an effect of a supreme—though remote—cause, God bears no vital, immediately creative, relation to the world. It is this artificial separation between God and the creature that Edwards sought to correct. "Many have wrong conceptions of the difference," he writes, "between the nature of the Deity and that of created spirits. T h e difference is no contrariety, but what naturally results from His greatness and nothing else." 7 8 God and the creature differ in "degree and manner of being," but not in substance. Finite beings have a relative ontological status in God as Being-in-general or all-inclusive Being. T h e idea that other beings exist outside the being of God is, to Edwards, unthinkable, for it opens the way to a thoroughgoing naturalism. This idea has nevertheless permeated all Protestant theology and is responsible for the God-over-against-the-creature idea which is just now being called into serious question by a variety of writers across the world, including S. L. Frank, Martin Buber, Karl Heim, Paul Tillich, such British writers as H. H. Farmer, Charles Duthie, and John Baillie, as well as the American, Charles Hartshorne. One thing all of these thinkers, along with Edwards, have in common is their opposition to the idea of interpreting the otherness of God as otherworldliness. Even Augustine, living in a pre-Copernican universe, knew well that God is "above us, not in place, but by His own awful and wonderful excellence." 7 9 Thus, he continues, "we neither draw nigh through space to God, who is everywhere and is contained in no space,

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nor do we draw apart from Him through space. T o draw nigh to Him is to become like Him, to draw apart from Him is to become unlike Him." 8 0 What Edwards calls a difference of "degree" between the Infinite and the finite points to the all-inclusiveness of God's being, while a difference of "manner" points to His transcendent excellence. God's "being and beauty is, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence." 8 1 T h e value of any species of being must always be "compounded of the proportion of excellence, or according to the degree of greatness and goodness, considered conjunctly." 8 2 It is primarily in the constitution and determination of his own all-enclosing self that God is qualitatively distinct from the creature. What Edwards is most concerned to show here is that no interval of time, no distance in space, and no independent substance have the power to separate the Creator from his creation. T h e degree and manner of the existence of any particular thing constitutes its individuality. Our individuality, then, is experienced not as actual independence of being but as self-consciousness and organic relatedness. Persons alone, of all creation, are equipped to participate directly and consciously in their environment. Animals participate in their environment indirectly and impersonally, that is, without the conscious experience of self and relation to other selves. Man lives in conscious encounter with his environment and in subconscious awareness that the world he perceives is not the world of ultimate reality, but, in the language of James Jeans, "only a curtain veiling a deeper reality beyond." 8 3 This dual experience of individuality in participation is the real basis for personal relationship. T h e worth of the individual is

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not diminished but enhanced because God is livingly present in each one to the degree that each lives consciously in God. T o use a geometric figure, God is to man as the field and the perimeter of an infinite circle is to a given point in the circle. God is at once all-encircling and immediately creative. Obviously, there can be no room for a self-contained entity within the infinite circle of being, for then God would be less than all-inclusive. Current nihilistic existentialism, as represented in JeanPaul Sartre, finds in man almost exactly what Edwards discovered in God: an absolute subject with uncontrolled freedom to create and transform, or destroy, his own world of experience. T h e human existent is a brute fact, according to this school of thought, totally unrelated in an absurd world of nothingness, striving for an impossible goal. In today's theology, an abstract and nonmystical theism that is unwilling to begin with the element of truth in pantheism has no ready answer for this brand of existentialism. It is vitally important that we learn to discredit, with Edwards, any and every view that tends to separate God at a distance from the world He has made, and thus isolate man as a self-contained entity. As Edwards saw it, the relation is not a unilateral one. In the doctrine of divine self-giving—to be developed fully in Chapter Five—the relation is bilateral: God is present and active on both sides of the relationship, yet without destroying the creature's experience of individuality and "over-againstness." "All that men do in real religion," he once wrote, "is entirely their own act and yet every tittle is wrought by the Spirit of God." 84 In the conscious experience of unity in God, the individual instead of being obliterated becomes more uniquely himself. A t the heart of all Christian mysticism lies the profound

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truth that we are never more truly ourselves than when we belong most fully to God. Edwards nowhere shows more deeply his concern that man's distinctness from God not be interpreted as separation, than in his discussion of finite freedom. His polemic on the subject has recently been called a "superdreadnaught" sent forth to combat contingency, and "the most thoroughgoing and absolutely destructive criticism that liberty of indifference, without necessity, has ever received." 88 Edwards first establishes the point that it is the man, and not the "will," that is free. T h i s is so because the "will" is not, as commonly supposed, a thing among things to which freedom may or may not be ascribed. " T h a t which has the power of volition or choice," he says, "is the man or the soul, and not the power of volition itself. And he that has the liberty of doing according to his will, is the agent or doer who is possessed of the will; and not the will which he is possessed of. W e say with propriety, that a bird let loose has power and liberty to fly; but not that the bird's power of flying has a power and liberty of flying." 88 T h e so-called "will," then, is in fact nothing more than a façon de parler. A second important point he establishes is that the selfs freedom does not consist in liberty of indifference but in action determined from within. Freedom lies in the fact that a man is at liberty to choose as he is inclined to choose. He is free to act according to his nature; he is not free to act contrary to his nature. No man can will other than he wills. He may choose what he loves and refuse what he hates, but he cannot, in the nature of the case, choose what he hates or refuse what he loves. Edwards the psychologist believed that there was an inseparable nexus between motive and action, and that motivation is always complex. As

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a man is predisposed by conscious desire or subconscious urge, and as he on that basis perceives the total situation, so he wills. The strength of the mind's perception, based on the predisposition of the whole person, determines in each instance the controlling motive. Every ethical decision involves both an internal inclination and an external inducement. To be sure, a given choice could have been otherwise, but only if the person choosing had been so inclined or else had failed to perceive the real alternatives. The main point he is concerned to refute is that the choice could have been otherwise irrespective of the predilection of the person who is making the choice. According as a man is inclined, so he perceives; as he perceives, so he chooses; as he chooses, so he acts. Confusion arises only when man confounds his power to choose with the power to determine his own being, and thus claims for himself an independent reserve of energy wholly at his own disposal. The feeling of ontological independence, that is, separation from God as Being-itself, is man's grandiose illusion. Ontological freedom in man is only the freedom to destroy himself, as a satellite that fails to orbit. In the final analysis, the only real freedom is freedom-in-God. The free man is the one who, by inclination and disposition, cannot help but choose God. As Edwards would say it, the free man is under the "sovereign dominion of love to God." 87 There is no basis in finite freedom for what might be called ontological separation from God on man's part. It is the inveterate misuse of our freedom that causes the moral distance which nothing short of the incarnation of God in Jesus the Christ can span.

IV. THE PROBLEM OF MORAL EVIL T h e human mind is profoundly dissatisfied with any form of absolute dualism, with a religion or a metaphysics for which ultimate Reality is not one and undivided. T h e dissatisfaction is not only felt with such crude dualisms as the Zoroastrian contrast of ultimate light and ultimate darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman, or the Manichaean dualism of Spirit and Matter; . . . it is even felt with the monotheistic "dualism" of Creator and creature ex nihilo. On the other hand, reason and the moral sense rebel at pantheistic monism which must reduce all things to a flat uniformity and assert that even the most diabolical things are precisely God, thus destroying all values. ALAN w . WATTS *

as Edwards sees it, results from the mistaken notion that the circumference of our own circle of experience is the perimeter of Being-itself. In other words, it springs from the illusion of independent individuality. When we mistake the particular for the universal we lose sight of the greater whole of which we are mere fragments, the dimension of depth in which we are grounded, and thus tend to isolate ourselves from the creative power at the center of our being. This distorted preoccupation with the unrelated self leads to egoism in social relations and to a psychological inversion of the ego in self-destruction. MORAL EVIL,

Sin itself is not an illusion, but a real disruption of the harmony of minds in an inherently good universe. It is a confusion and frustration in the individual mind resulting • Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity (New York, Pantheon, 1947), p. 132.

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from a supposed independence of universal Mind. In the case of the egocentric mind, otherwise good things may actually turn into evil because viewed singly and with an exclusively private reference. 1 Edwards understands the individual who is consciously unrelated to God as partial and fragmented. When the fragmentary mind asserts itself as a self-contained entity it isolates itself from the depth in which it exists ontologically, and thus becomes, in fact and experience, a negative being, an abstraction. T h e isolated self is faced always with the threat of the meaninglessness of its being, although it can never quite escape from the ontological ground in which it is rooted. Sin is not a metaphysical hiatus, but a moral rupture in the harmony of minds, together with the physical, psychological, and social consequences that ensue. So much, in fact, are individual minds interdependent and organically dependent on the "all-comprehending Mind" that "if any created being were of a temper to oppose Being-in-general," Edwards remarks, "that would infer the most universal and greatest possible discord, not only of creatures with their Creator, but of created beings one with another." 2 Edwards finds the root of the egocentric mind in the moral consequence of the absence of divine Love in the human heart. T h e highest act of creativity is God's personal communication to created minds, of which all else is but a shadowy image. Every beauty and harmony of nature and mind is an "image of love." 3 All that is essential in the world is created by a constant and positive divine agency, that is, by divine self-communication. T h e distorted vision and selfish attitude of the human mind is not a direct result of God's immediate creativity, but, on the contrary, is the lack of a living consciousness of His presence. In ex-

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perience this means that the very minds which are the subjects of God's highest act of creativity are, at the same time, the inevitable locus of sin. T h e human mind is finite a n d fragmentary, and therefore faced with the constant threat of isolation and the temptation to absolutize itself or some particle of being, mistaking its own narrow horizon for that of Being-itself. Moral evil is the lack of a direct a n d living awareness of God's creative presence—his presence in Love. It has n o reality for God, but is a real force in the finite, individual mind which is chained to the relative and the partial. It is granted that G o d has created a world in which floods and tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes take their perennial toll; in which disease, pain, sorrow, and death are k n o w n facts. Idiots are born, lepers suffer, wars are a constant threat, and anxiety drives many into paranoia. "It is evident by experience," Edwards acknowledges, "that great evil, both moral and natural, abounds in the world. It is manifest that great injustices, violence, treachery, perfidiousness, and extreme cruelty to the innocent, abound in the world; as well as innumerable extreme sufferings, issuing finally in destruction and death, are general all over the world in all ages." * T h a t such "should be ordered or permitted in a world absolutely and perfectly under the care and government of an infinitely holy and good G o d , discovers a seeming repugnancy to reason, that few, if any, have been able fully to remove."

5

A n appeal to causality

only enlarges the problem, for we are caught in the dilemma of affirming that "either the First Cause must be both good and evil, wise and foolish, or else there must be two First Causes, an evil and irrational, as well as a good and wise principle."

6

It would seem that we are forced to

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choose between dualism and pantheism. If we dismiss dualism, as Christianity has done, we are still faced with the choice of conceiving of divine Being as including both good and evil—in which case we risk calling God's fundamental goodness into question 7—or of denying reality to the dishonorable part of the universe, in which case our solution is irrelevant to the actual situation. T h e problem of evil seems to leave us with only two logical possibilities: either we must accept the existence of evil and deny meaning to existence, or our conviction that life has meaning compels us to deny the reality of evil. In his search for a solution Edwards refused to qualify either his reverence for God's transcendent "excellence" or his sense of the tragedy of life. He seeks an explanation in the direction of the limitation of the finite mind. T h e really pressing problem centers in moral evil. In fact, in a total view, and in the last analysis, there is no other evil. This is because nothing in the universe is "evil in its nature," as Calvin—and Augustine before him—had taught, but all evil is "a corruption of nature." 8 Given the inescapable fact of universal moral evil, as the propensity in all of us to place our own private interests above the interests of others, (and this is what Edwards means by "original sin"), it is the morally conditioned self which determines the particular forms evil will take. Human freedom is to be understood not as liberty of indifference but as self-determination. T h e psychologist A. A. Roback agrees that, since Edwards' determinism involves only moral decisions and actions, he should be classed not with absolute determinists like Spinoza or fatalists like Mohammed, but with self-determinists in modern psychology.9 In order to understand that all evil is rooted in moral

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evil it first must be established that, metaphysically, evil is a perversion of being. This perversion is experienced as estrangement. Where evil is present the one thing lacking is a direct and conscious participation in the being of God which is every moment creating, sustaining, and directing our lives. All the attitudes and actions we call sinful are fatal consequences of the want of a vitally personal relationship between the soul and God. Sin is the condition in which a human being is living on an impersonal, animal level of existence. Man is that higher animal which, in its nature, is incomplete. He knows he belongs to God and he is also aware in the subconscious mind that his life is separated from God. He exposes this separation by actions that begin in anxiety and end in futility. In this sense moral evil is a deprivation of being. There is in the very being of man what Charles Duthie has called "a Godward-pointing status," 1 0 a reference to his divine source and ground. T h i s is a man's ontological unity with God which, alas, he can deny and even spurn. And this is why sin is so serious; a man cuts himself loose, morally and spiritually—and for all practical purposes—from the supporting ground and moving center of his own being, without which he would not be at all. But to say that moral evil is a deprivation is not inconsistent with the further idea that it issues in guilt and opposition. Though the nature of sin is inherently privative, it assumes at once an active form—in selfishness, guilt feeling, and rebellious attitude—as soon as ever a man carries his motives into action. T h e two apparently contradictory ideas—privation and rebellion—meet in Edwards' fundamental conviction that the root of sin consists in the absence of divine Love—which is God's self-communication

7°

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par excellence— in the human heart. This absence of God in the heart leaves a vacuum that is filled, however inadequately, by the human ego. "The inferior principles of self-love, and natural appetite, which were given only to serve" man in his pursuit of God, become "reigning principles." With "no superior principles to regulate or control them" they become "absolute masters of the heart." T h e immediate consequence of this, he continues, is a "fatal catastrophe, a turning of all things upside down, and the succession of a state of the most odious and dreadful confusion." 11 This fatal catastrophe occurs when man sets up "himself, and the objects of his private affections and appetites, as supreme," so that they take "the place of God." This does not mean that psychological self-love and natural appetite are inherently evil, Edwards is careful to point out, but that they become evil in the mind of those who illicitly raise them to the level of self-regulating principles. "Physical desire is like fire in a house; which we say is a good servant, but a bad master; very useful while kept in its place, but if left to take possession of the whole house, soon brings all to destruction." 12 T o recapitulate, Edwards stresses the point that moral evil results not from God's infusing a positive evil quality into the soul, but simply from a void left in the absence of His creative love. In the language of Pascal, there is in every human heart an "infinite abyss" which "can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself." 13 Sin is privative in the sense that it originates in the absence of a spiritual ingredient necessary to the fulfillment of human personality. The chief characteristic of creatureliness is the inclina-

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tion to sin by placing our own interests above the interests of others. Edwards agrees with Augustine in affirming that while sin is not necessary it is inevitable. As every man, following Adam, falls under the force of temptation, the "divine principle" which is the very life of the soul leaves him, "for indeed God then left him [Adam] . . . the Holy Spirit, that divine inhabitant, forsook the house," leaving "nothing but flesh without spirit." 14 Without the controlling power and guiding light of a "spiritual sense," a man finds no genuine fulfillment in life, only anxiety, frustration, and futility. It is with all men as it was with Adam: The Spirit of God departed from him, and with his influence, God's holy image also, the life, the crown, and glory of his nature left him, and all light, and regularity, and order were gone, and a worse darkness and confusion succeeded than was in the primitive chaos when it was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.1® There remain only "the principles of human nature in its animal state." 16 Man regresses to what the evolutionist would call a previous stage of development. Not that all vestiges of the imago Dei are effaced, for a man remains intact and there is still something in his nature to which the grace of God can appeal in addressing him, but what is left is "chaos," all light and regularity and order gone. One of the tragic consequences of man's regression to a primitive state of existence is the decline of the power of reason so that it functions inconsistently with itself and out of harmony with "the end for which God created the world." When reason lacks integration with the total self and its environment it has no motivating principle outside itself. Being out of touch with ontological reason—the Logos-structure of reality—it reduces itself to mere theo-

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retical reason. It is precisely the purpose of the "spiritual sense" to reintegrate the functions of the human personality by uniting the cognitive and aesthetic powers of the mind in a vision of spiritual beauty, thereby restoring what Edwards calls "the life of the soul." In the present condition of human nature, as we know it, the perversion lies, then, in the fact that the "principles of human nature" are left alone, "without spiritual principles to govern and direct them. For the principles of human nature, when alone and left to themselves, are principles of corruption, and there are no other principles of corruption in man b u t these." 17 In contradistinction to Roman Catholic doctrine, sin has its root not "in the inordinancy of bodily appetites" but in the fact that h u m a n nature is left to govern itself, "being destitute of the Spirit of God, and so having nothing above human nature." 18 From this it follows that the designation "spiritual" is not intended in opposition to "corporeal," but instead "as relating to the Spirit of God." 19 Accordingly natural men are called "natural" because "they have nothing b u t nature." 20 He illustrates the difference between the "natural" and the "spiritual" m a n by comparing two hypothetical persons—one born with, the other without, a sense of taste: both these persons may in some respects love the same object: the one may love a delicious kind of fruit, which is beautiful to the eye, and of a delicious taste; not only because he has seen its pleasant colors, but knows its sweet taste; the other, perfectly ignorant of this, loves it only for its beautiful colors: there are many things seen, in some respect, to be common to both; both love, both desire, and both delight; but the love, and desire, and delight of the one, is altogether diverse from that of the other. The difference between the love of a natural man and spiritual man is like to this; but only it must be observed, that in one re-

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spect it is vastly greater, viz. that the kinds of excellency which are perceived in spiritual objects, by these different kinds of persons, are in themselves vastly more diverse, than the different kinds of excellency perceived in delicious fruit, by a tasting and a tasteless man; and in another respect it may not be so great, viz. as the spiritual man may have a spiritual sense or taste, to perceive that divine and most peculiar excellency, but in small beginnings, and in a very imperfect degree. 21

The experience necessary for conversion from one orientation to the other is radical and decisive, constituting "an immediate infusion or operation of the Divine Being upon the soul." 22 T h e distinguishing ingredient in the heart of a true Christian, "which is the grand Christian virtue, and which is the soul and essence and summary comprehension of all graces, is a principle of divine love." 23 This is basic to Edwards' analysis of the ethical problem. Concretely conceived, grace is love—the ethical content of the "sense of the heart." T h e difference, then, between the "spiritual" and the "natural" man is precisely that between a mere self and a person. Without God, man is less than a person. This does not mean that the Spirit of God is in no sense present with the "natural" man, but it does mean that the "natural" man is destitute of the "sense" by which to recognize or identify the creative power at the root of his own being. And he is destitute of this sense because he does not partake of the essential nature of God's Spirit—which is agape, or Love. Grace in the heart "is not only from the Spirit, but it also partakes of the nature of that Spirit." 24 Augustine held a similar view of evil as deprivation. He accounts for this through his doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Since creation came out of nothing it always tends to lapse into a state of nothingness, and this negative pull explains the estrangement from God and the presence of evil. Both

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Augustine and Edwards espoused a form of the Neoplatonic emanation-return doctrine by which the plenitude of God's being flows outward in creation and returns to God who gave it. Edwards never got around to reconciling this with the Puritan doctrines of election and endless punishment according to which only a small fraction of mankind ever return from whence they came, so that the divine inflow is quite unequal to the outflow. T h e only explanation Edwards gives is the Puritan rationalization 25 that the glory of God manifested in the saints far outweighs the glory of the first creation. the logic of his position by acknowledging the implication that God is the cause of moral evil in the negative sense that He intentionally withdraws his qualitative presence, thus leaving the heart empty and the will impotent. But he emphatically denies that this implies a sinful disposition in God. H e insists that culpability lies in the motive of the sinful heart and distinguishes God's end in disposing sin from man's motive in sinning. "God decrees that they [sinful acts] shall be sinful, for the sake of the good that he causes to arise from the sinfulness thereof; whereas man decrees them for the sake of the evil that is in them." 26 T h i s does not mean that men are always conscious of their sinful motivation, for in every act of sin they are seeking what they value as good for themselves. But because Edwards locates the core of moral evil in selfish self-centeredness, on this definition he could consistently affirm that men indulge in sinful acts "for the sake of the evil that is in them," whether they spring from conscious motive or involuntary urge. Roback finds a point of incidence between Edwards and Freud in that Edwards felt EDWARDS FACES

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that man is in some sense a victim of sin in this kind of universe.27 Human freedom makes sin inevitable, and yet who would care to live in a world without freedom of action and self-determination? It seems that God himself had to make a great choice whether to create a world of freedom and sin or a sinless world of robots and automatons.28 The larger explanation of the problem of evil in Edwards' thought is a direct corollary of his ontology. In line with the Platonic-realist tradition he adopted a form of the argument that the deformity of the part augments the beauty of the whole. With this framework in view he could reason that God creates the situation under which sin inevitably comes to pass, but he does not create sin as such. " I utterly deny God to be the author of sin," he asserts, "if by the 'author of sin,' be meant the sinner, the agent, or actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing." 29 But, he continues, if by the "author of sin" be meant a disposer of the state of events, in such a manner, for wise, holy, and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it be permitted or not hindered, will most certainly and infallibly follow: I say, if this be all that is meant, by being the author of sin, I do not deny that God is the author of sin (though I dislike and reject the phrase, as that which by use and custom is apt to carry another sense).80 Man is the agent of sin, while God is the ultimate cause of its existence. God's creating a world of such variegation and multiformity presents to the mind of man the occasion for moral decision. "There is a great difference between God's being . . . the Orderer of the certain existence [of sin], by not hindering it, under certain circumstances, and his being the proper actor or author, of it, by a positive agency or efficiency." 31

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T h a t God should design and order the existence of evil does not mean that his will is evil, that his actions are moved by an evil impulse. Sin is, by definition, selfishness springing from a preoccupation with the unrelated self and a narrow view of reality. T h e term is therefore applicable only to the finite mind. T h e occasion of moral evil is the condition in which man, under the limitations of finitude, may and inevitably will, through a perverted sense of value, isolate and absolutize some part or particle of the infinite circle of being. Sin is not a positive creation, he insists, but a privative condition resulting from the absence of divine agency in the human soul, as darkness and cold result from the absence of the light and warmth of the sun. Evil is a minus quantity. " I f the sun were the proper cause of cold and darkness," he writes, "it would be the fountain of these things, as it is the fountain of light and heat: and then something might be argued from the nature of cold and darkness, to a likeness of nature in the sun; and it might be justly inferred, that the sun itself is dark and cold, and that its beams are black and frosty." 32 On the contrary, one may also infer from the nature of cold and darkness "that the sun is a bright and hot body, if cold and darkness are found to be the consequences of its withdrawment." So, inasmuch as sin is not the fruit of any positive agency or influence of the Most High, but, on the contrary, arises from the withholding of his action and energy, and, under certain circumstances, necessarily follows on the want of His influence; this is no argument that He is sinful, or his operation evil, or has any thing of the nature of evil, but, on the contrary, that He and his agency are altogether good and holy, and that He is the fountain of all holiness. It would be strange arguing, indeed, because men never commit sin, but only when God leaves them to themselves, and necessarily sin, when he does so, that therefore their sin is not

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from themselves but from God; and so, that God must be a sinful Being: as strange as it would be to argue, because it is always dark when the sun is gone, and never dark when the sun is present, that therefore all darkness is from the sun, and that his disk and beams must needs be black. 88

As the absence of the sun's light and heat is the occasion of darkness and coldness on the earth, so the absence of God's qualitative presence in the human heart is the occasion of a distorted vision and a selfish disposition. This illustrates how God may order and dispose the existence of an "event, which in the subject and agent is moral evil; and yet His so doing may be no moral evil." 84 While this position is beset with difficulties, the only logical alternative is the Zoroastrian view that evil is a rival force over which God has uncertain control. Edwards' view focuses the classical argument that a thing may be evil when considered in a fragmentary view, but when viewed wtih respect to "the whole compass and extent of existence, and all consequences in the endless series of events," it is a good.35 Sin is not an entity but a defect which, if viewed in its total relations, is conducive to the good of the whole. Although a Neoplatonic idea, it found expression in the thought of Augustine when he likened the beauty of the universe to "the beauty of a picture increased by well-managed shadows; so, to the eye that has skill to discern it, the universe is beautiful even by sinners, though, considered by themselves, their deformity is a sad blemish." 39 It is not known to what extent Edwards was acquainted firsthand with the writings of Augustine. But the extent of the Augustinian influence upon Puritan writers in general is beyond dispute, and of course Leibniz' theodicy is permeated with the Augustinian view. Much of

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the best in Puritan thought reduced lower evil to higher good by arguing that without sin God's justice would have no concrete actualization and the atonement of Christ would be superfluous. 37 In R . B. Perry's analysis of Puritan doctrine: the higher good is not sinlessness, but repentance, the chastened spirit, or the victory over temptation. Sin in itself, then, is not evil; but only sin unrepented, unassimilated, unsubdued. Similarly, as judged by the higher standard of justice it is sin-unpunished and not simple sin which is evil; while sin-punished is good.' 8

T h e rationalization that Hell, as a place of endless punishment for sins never to be forgiven, is a good thing because it vindicates divine justice did not, as some imply, originate with the Puritans, nor with the Calvinists, not even with the scholastics. Augustine, Aquinas, Gregory of Nyssa, and Dante, all picture the "righteous" rejoicing at the everlasting pains of sinners in Hell. But the doctrine of eternal punishment originated not with the Christians but with Jewish apocalyptic writers. Instead of being a victory over evil, as intended, it is instead an immortalization of evil. T h e central purpose of the doctrine is to make retributive justice the ultimate law of the spiritual universe, whereas Christianity teaches that the highest spiritual attitude is forgiveness. T h e difference between retributive justice and forgiveness as a higher kind of justice is clearly set forth by J o h n Baillie: [The former] makes good stand opposed to evil in equal and opposite reactions, [while the latter] makes good overcome evil and blot it out. What the doctrine of eternal punishment does, then, is to make evil an eternal element in the universe, no less

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positively real than the good itself; a result which must always follow from the attempt to regard punishment as an end in itself, instead of a reformatory discipline. But this is Manichean dualism; and how can St. Augustine have countenanced it? He could do so only because he was able to persuade himself that whereas unpunished sin was an evil, sin properly punished was not an evil but a good. 3 9

Although Edwards went beyond this view, it was the Augustinian legacy that enabled him to preach eternal reprobation with something resembling the same passion that he used in affirming the all-embracing love of God. But it should be noted that his ontology is even more compatible with a theory of universal restoration in which God's sovereignty is fully and finally realized. If Edwards sought at times to frighten men into seeking God, it was because by so doing they might come to share his vision of God's beauty and grandeur and the inexpressible happiness of life with God. T h e notion of conscious, endless punishment is inadequate for us because it posits the coeternity of evil with God. T h e Puritan escaped this implication, as did Augustine, by positing eternal punishment as an ultimate good. But the Puritan could not escape so easily the implication of a dialectical negativity, or "split personality," in God, which would seem to suggest an evil disposition in the character of God. A still more repulsive implication is that if sin is not an evil, in the last analysis, then neither is virtue a good. T h e danger is that all distinctions disappear in a nebulous concept of divine sovereignty. Though evil may change its form, the problem of evil still remains. While observation has led some to the conclusion that only what

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is good is real, Santayana is reported to have concluded the contrary: "All that is evil is real; all that is good is phantasy." Edwards' preaching of eternal punishment seems to have been, in part at least, an experiment in evangelism, the extremes of which he himself acknowledges in the treatise on religious affections. In his philosophy it takes the place of a limiting concept—as the logical negation of a univocal predication of being, as a symbol of "nothingness." Though it is impossible to think of an actual separation of a selfconscious person from God in an experience of unending suffering, the doctrine of condemnation nevertheless expresses the experience of the threat of self-exclusion from eternal life in God. I n the "Miscellanies" he writes: "Sin against God, in God's idea, is infinite, and the punishment is infinite not otherwise but in the idea of God; for all that is past and all that is to come, that is not comprehended in finite ideas, is not anywhere else but in the divine idea." 4 0 On this subject Tillich says: "thinking is demanded on two levels. On the creaturely level, ontological elements and categories are applicable in a proper and literal sense. On the level of God's relation to the creature, the categories are affirmed and negated at the same time." 4 1 It is instructive to follow Edwards' handling of the classical solution of the problem of evil, realizing as he did that evil is a problem in any system and the proverbial Gordian knot of all philosophy. Paradoxical as it may seem, Edwards perceived that evil, in a total view, may be the occasion of good. This virtually amounts to a new act of creation: although alien to the purpose of God, moral evil in itself is seen to be, nevertheless, a finite fact out of which God is continually creating new forms of life and beauty.

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At the same time, a selfish disposition and motivation in the heart of man is, without exception, an evil on the human level. Men do will sin as sin, and so are the authors and actors of it. They love it as sin, and for evil ends and purposes. Cod does not will sin as sin, or for the sake of any thing evil; though it be his pleasure so to order things, that he permitting, sin will come to pass; for the sake of the great good that by his disposal shall be the consequence. His willing to order things so that evil should come to pass, for the sake of the contrary good, is no argument that he does not hate evil, as evil; and if so, then it is no reason why he may not reasonably forbid evil, as evil, and punish it as such.42 When sin is spoken of as contrary to God's will, "It is contrary to his will, considered only as in itself. As man commits it, it is contrary to God's will, for men act in committing it with a view to that which is evil." God, however, in permitting it "has respect to the great good that he will make it an occasion of." 4 3 Edwards cites the crucifixion of Jesus as the supreme example of this paradox. But even in common experience good, without its dialectical opposite, would be unknowable and incapable of compelling our appreciation. No man would love and value the good if he did not know its antipode. No one can love God who does not feel the pain of separation from God. Light presupposes darkness; good presupposes evil. We little consider how much the sense of good is heightened by the sense of evil, both moral and natural. And as it is necessary that there should be evil, because the display of the glory of God could not be imperfect and incomplete without it, so evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature's happiness consists in the knowledge of God and sense of his love. 44

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Seen in a comprehensive perspective "the sense of good is comparatively dull and flat, without the knowledge of evil." 45 T h e suggestion is that, while evil is never a good in and of itself, the knowledge of evil can be a good when it issues ultimately in good actions. T h e discord and tension between the actual and the ideal appear to be necessary to moral consciousness. T h e mind's partial view of things is not an evil in itself, considered in the wider context, because it is conducive of a higher good. Yet it is an occasion of evil on the human level. T h e important point is that evil is first, last, and always a finite phenomenon. Edwards is not denying the fact of evil, or its negative force as non-being (resistance to Being), but he is questioning its ontological status. In his early notes he alluded to evil as "Nothing, or a degree of Nothing," and went on to show that, if Being-itself is "the greatest and only good," then the negation of Being is "the greatest and only evil." 48 T h e polar concept of nonbeing, which he apparently did not find occasion to develop fully, might have enabled him to move on in the direction of a dialectical realism as the logical alternative to pure monism or dualism. T h i s would open the possibility of recognizing that evil has existential significance without having ontological status. Edwards' monism was not a closed system of identity, or "all-in-one," in which all distinctions dissolve. He saw a polarity of good and evil in this kind of world, yet he also saw that there can be no permanent conflict of forces. He concludes his discussion of the problem by affirming that evil is an evil thing, and yet it may be a good thing that evil should be in the world. There is certainly a difference between

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the thing itself existing, and its being an evil thing that ever it came into existence. As, for instance, it might be an evil thing to crucify Christ, but yet it was a good thing that the crucifying of Christ came to pass. As men's act, it was evil, but as God ordered it, it was good. 47

The evil of the part is conducive to the good of the whole. In view of this, a thing is evil only when considered "within its own bounds" and with merely a private reference, but this narrow perspective is the inveterate condition of the human mind. Sin is an evil when considered in isolation from the system of universal existence comprehended in God; a good when viewed in its total relations, sub specie aeternitatis. T h e defect of the part augments the beauty of the whole; the discord as such disappears in a larger harmony. For example, they tell us that a discord introduced in a symphony at just the right moment, instead of detracting, actually contributes to the greater beauty of the theme variation about to be played. This is not apparent, however, to finite vision. The inner consistency of the universe is not self-evident. Nevertheless things which are evil when viewed singly and from a narrow point of view are to the all-comprehending vision of God component parts of an ultimate system of good. These lines of John Dryden point up the classic truth: Whatever is, is right. Though purblind man Sees but a part o' the chain, the nearest link: His eyes not carrying to the equal beam, That poises all above. 48

In the language of F. H. Bradley, "the ends which fail are ends selected by ourselves, and selected more or less erroneously. They are too partial, as we have taken them, and if included in a larger end to which they are relative,

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they cease to be failures. T h e y , in short, subserve a wider scheme, and in that they are realized."

49

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mean that finite ends, as such, are realized, but rather that each is lost, "and becomes an element in a wider idea which is one with existence." absorbed into an

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all-inclusive

perfection. T h a t

which,

taken in itself, is deemed evil assumes, in a larger context, the character of good. Edwards is careful to warn, however, that this comprehensive understanding of the problem does not allow the excuse of committing evil in order that good may result. I do not argue that God may commit evil, that good may come of it; but that he may will that evil should come to pass, and permit that it may come to pass, that good may come of it. It is in itself absolutely evil, for any being to commit evil that good may come of it; but it would be no evil, but good, if he had wisdom sufficient to see certainly that good would come of it, or that more good would come to pass that way than any other.51 T h e most shattering argument that can be leveled against this view is that concerning its social implications. Is not every monist obliged to adopt an attitude of indifference in the face of injustice? I f evil disappears for us once we learn to contemplate reality as a whole and not merely the parts, does this not tend to make us unconcerned about the individual parts and insensitive to pain and sorrow in the world? Is Nicolas Berdyaev perhaps right in his criticism that all forms of monistic philosophy constitute " a mockery of the measureless suffering of men and of all created things?"

52

W h a t grounds have we for assuming a practical

attitude of opposition to evil if we know that it serves a higher good in a wider scheme? Perry urges this criticism against the

Puritan form of the classical solution to the

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problem of evil: " I f man under God's guidance, and with a confidence begotten by faith in God's power, sets his face against evil and undertakes to destroy it, he implies that evil, even though its defeat be certain, is alien both to himself and to God, causally as well as morally." 5 3 Edwards' thought was not sufficiently dialectical to overcome this difficulty. In other writings he found further grounds for ethical decision and action. Concerning the problem of evil he was compelled to appeal finally, as Calvin did at the outset, to the mystery of God's inscrutable wisdom in permitting evil when he could have prevented it. At the same time, however, Edwards had another answer ready, namely, that since moral evil is an inescapable fact and limitation of finite existence, and since man can never know in advance the possible good which God may create out of the results of man's blundering, we must make every effort to eradicate it. All moral evil has social implications. It is a disruption in the harmony of minds due to an egocentric attitude of the heart. T h e elimination of this egocentric disposition is a higher good on the practical level of life, without which the existence of evil would have no divine purpose behind it. Presumably it is God's will that a self-giving love should replace a self-seeking disposition, since through the power of this higher love a man is able to transcend himself and fulfill the real end of his existence. But the ultimate reconciliation of evil as an occasion of good with good itself is apparently beyond the reach of the human intellect. T h e real tragedy of sin, in Edwards' view, is that a man's heart, which was made to embrace within itself the whole of creation and the Creator, is circumscribed within the narrow limits of the ego. 54 T h e radical, "original," charac-

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ter of moral evil consists in the inevitability of egoism as soon as ever a man translates his creative self-love into action. Radical moral evil is a "fatal propensity" in the mind to turn one's desire for self-fulfillment to selfish rather than creative ends. He rejects the usual imputation theory of original sin, according to which we are blamed for Adam's sin, or according to which we may relieve ourselves of blame by logically forcing the responsibility for our actions upon Adam. He argues that sin is always a voluntary act, or an inclination to a certain kind of act, and that motive and action are inseparable. Consequently our sin "is not ours, merely because God 'imputes' it to us; but it is truly and properly ours, and on that ground, God imputes it to us." 85 W e are sinners because we sin and not because we inherit a virus of concupiscence. Edwards combines a realistic view of sin with an even more realistic view of human nature. It is a defect in the mind, not in nature, that makes a man unsuited to his environment. Sin is not a physical privation or an hereditary defect, but an ethical privation—a lack of love in the human heart. 68 Man's narrow viewpoint and selfish desire stand in opposition to the grand design of creation. T h e egoist upsets the scale of values because he seeks the small as though it were the great, the partial as though it were the whole, the selfish as if it were the summum bonum.87 Sin is a kind of "self-opposition." T h e man who lives by selfish impulse and exploits the interests of others to his own advantage is not only running counter to the harmony and purpose of the universe; he is also living "inconsistent with himself, and as it were, against himself, in his own actions." 8 8 T h i s self-opposition is the cause of many strange disturbances in the mind. When, for example, we

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act toward another person in a manner that we know would anger us were we in his place "we disagree with ourselves, and contradict ourselves." 5 9 T h i s self-contradiction leads gradually to self-destruction. T h e Christian ultimatum is, therefore, in Smiley Blanton's words, "love or perish!" No man can go on sinning without provoking the opposition of the universe itself, without detaching himself morally and spiritually from the supporting ground and creative power at the center of his being. Herein lies the difference between the virtuous and the nonvirtuous: the latter are confined within "an infinitely small part of this great Whole we stand related to." T h e former are moved by the "disposition to love God supremely," who is himself "the great Whole" to which we stand related. 90 T h e selfish individual lives thus in a state of opposition to himself, to the world, and to God. As Edwards expressed it in an early essay on "Excellency," any supposed beauty which is beautiful "only with respect to itself and a few other things, and not as a part of that which contains all things is false beauty and a confined beauty." 6 1 I suppose no one has ever been more overwhelmed with the tragic sense of life than Jonathan Edwards, suffering actual rejection and isolation for the views he held. In fact, it is only with this side of his thought that the average student is familiar. But on a closer examination of his private notebooks the reader finds that his whole structure begins and ends on the note of "cosmic optimism." 6 2 Here is no Weltschmertz, no cosmic melancholy. Evil has no positive status, though it is a hard fact in human experience, a real perversion of being and resistance against being in the finite mind. Evil is finite, and all things finite are included in the all-encircling reality of God, there being

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no negative principle outside of God to account for the facts of experience. If we are obliged to posit a dialectical negativity in God, then we must, with Edwards, be careful to distinguish the all-embracing being of God from His inmost character. But we are simply called upon to participate directly and consciously in the wisdom and love of God which enfold all things. Within the vision of "all things in God" pain, for example, is no longer evaluated from an exclusively private reference. It becomes increasingly clear that love, the fountain of all virtues, can be learned—as history proves it has always been learned—only through the experience of personal suffering. We are to continue to pray, "deliver us from evil," until it is finally overcome, yet all the while realizing that the spiritual strength derived from resistance against it includes an upward as well as a downward pull. Paradoxically, evil in itself is meaningless, while the experience of evil involves the highest possible meaning. In the language of Berdyaev, "evil can be a dialectic moment in the unfolding development of created things, but only because through it the good which is opposed to it is disclosed." 6 3 Even though all things finite exist under the privative condition of evil, every particular thing is potentially an "image" or "shadow" of the transcendent beauty of God. T h e r e are relative degrees of beauty in the world—material beauties being reflections of spiritual beauties, and spiritual beauties the manifestation of God's continued and immediate creativity in the universe. No entity is independent or self-contained because each is by itself a mere fragment of being. But as an image of God's ineffable beauty each fragment becomes meaningful and significant as augmenting the

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inclusive harmony of the "great Whole." A self-contained individual is to Edwards a meaningless abstraction, a monstrous absurdity. All virtuous qualities in the human personality are "emanations" or "communications" of God, immediate expressions of his wisdom and love. And all the other aesthetic qualities of nature and mind are images of divine love. "When one thing sweetly harmonizes with another," he wrote in an early fragment, "as the notes in music, the notes are so conformed, and have such proportion one to another, that they seem to have respect one to another, as if they loved one another." 6 4

V. THE SELF-GIVING NATURE OF GOD T h e world lives by its incarnation of God in itself. . . . He is the binding element in the world. T h e consciousness which is individual in us, is universal in him: the love which is partial in us is all-embracing in him. Apart from him there could be no world, because there could be no adjustment of individuality. . . . He is not the world, but the valuation of the world. A. N. WHITEHEAD *

of Edwards' controlling idea of divine immediacy we must view it in conjunction with his doctrine of God's "self-communication." While this is the term Edwards uses, the idea behind it is much more dynamic and thrilling than the word suggests to our minds today. He is writing here not about God revealing certain words or propositions concerning Himself, but about the dramatic self-movement of God in creation and history, of God's self-revelation as an ongoing process. This subject is treated at length in the posthumously published dissertation on The End for Which God Created the World, a work which A. C. McGiffert, Sr., called "one of the most significant and prophetic in the whole range of modern theological literature." 1 Here we enter the mystical reaches of his thought in a view that is consistent not only with the notion of divine immediacy in the college notes, but also with his mature conclusions in the treatise on sin, published a few weeks after his death. The dissertation is, like many another treatise, a product of reflections set down

TO GRASP THE FULL MEANING

• Religion

in the Making

(New York, Macmillan, 1954), pp. 156-59.

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earlier in his intellectual diary, the "Miscellanies." The doctrine of God's self-movement is present in toto in the manuscript notes: "God made all things; and the end for which all things are made, and for which they are disposed, and for which they work continually, is that God's glory may shine forth and be received." 2 In this treatise we see the climax of Edwards' attempt to "Neoplatonize" Calvinism. God's essential glory consists in the perfect idea or image he has of himself and the infinite love he extends toward the multifarious aspects of his own all-inclusive being. God expresses this internal glory ad extra, in terms of excellency and happiness, by communicating the same to created minds and hearts. Both aspects of God's personal communication may be called His glory in the more extensive sense of the word, viz., his shining forth, or the going forth of his excellency, beauty and essential glory, ad extra. By the one way it goes forth towards created understandings, by the other it goes forth towards their wills or hearts. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. 3

This is the telos of all creativity in nature, history, and the human heart. This is the inner secret of the universe, the clue to the meaning of existence. "God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, his glory; and that it might be received both by the mind ancl heart." Both foci of God's communication spring from the same cause, that is, the overflowing of God's internal glory, or an inclination in God to cause his internal glory to flow out ad extra. What God has in view in either of them, either in his manifesting his glory to the understanding or his communication of it to the heart, is not that

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he may receive but that he may go forth. T h e main end of his shining forth is, not that he may have his rays reflected back to himself, but that the rays may go forth.*

But Edwards is quick to anticipate the charge that his view implies selfishness in God, and he answers the objection by pointing out that God's desire to communicate goodness is prior to His desire to honor it. I know there is an inconsistence in supposing that God inclines to exercise goodness, i.e., good to others, merely for the sake of the honor of His goodness; for the very notion of goodness is an inclination of heart to do good to others, and therefore the existence of such an inclination must be conceived of as prior to an inclination to honor it. T h e r e must first be an inclination of the heart to do good before God desires to honor that inclination. 9

God is by nature a communicative being. In an early sermon, based on James i. 17, Edwards likens God to "an overflowing fountain or luminary." Like the sun—Edwards' favorite image—God "is abundantly communicative; he is a fountain of goodness continually scattering abroad himself and diffusing of his bounty plentifully and abundantly as the sun diffuses his rays; as the light of the sun fills the world, so does God's goodness." As the sermon moves on, the point is made that God gives himself even more generously than the sun, "for as the sun turns from us it leaves a shadow, but God is without a shadow of turning." There are two things especially that God communicates: excellency and happiness. "All creatures receive their excellency from God as the moon and planets have their light from the sun," and since God is "a fountain of happiness" the rays that stream forth from him "are as it were streams of pleasure and happiness." 6 But God's disposition to give himself freely, to diffuse his

T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE O F GOD

9$

glory in a created world, does not negate creaturely fulfillment. God's glory and the creatures' good are coincident. His infinite being including within itself the meaning and fulfillment of created existence. " T h e creature is the object of God's regard consequentially, and by implication, as it were, comprehended in God." 7 T h e creature's highest good is to be cognizant of God's glory and to participate in His supernal excellence. But God is "absolutely self-moved. T h e exercises of his communicative disposition are absolutely from within himself." 8 It is not that God finds something good in the object that excites him to communicate, for there is no good in any object that is independent of God himself, he being "all that is good and worthy in the object, and the very being of the object." 9 This divine glory, of which Christ is the effulgence and the Holy Spirit the vivifying energy, is the self-giving of God to be known and loved. It is God's being in its unconditioned spiritual creativity which is perpetually flowering into new forms of life, based upon profound and impenetrable depths of infinity. Edwards grasps the objective force of the Hebraic concept cabhodh, which designates the shining forth or flowing outward of God's inexhaustible fullness in communicated streams of light and love.10 This mystical view of the dynamic self-movement of God, His outgoing concern, his self-spending agape, is consonant with Edwards' own intensely personal experience of God. "There came into my soul," he reminisces, "and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being. . . . T h e appearance of every thing was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every thing." 1 1 In communicating himself God is in no way conditioned

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by the world as though it subsists in its own right. T o Him, communicating is nothing different from creating, for "giving being is one part of the communication. God's goodness is not an inclination to communicate himself, as occasion shall offer, or a disposition, conditionally, to communicate himself; but absolutely." 12 There is no room for a passive and inert conception of God. God cannot be inert or passive with respect to creation, for he is the very being of the world in its depth and power—as well as its "continued immediate efficiency." In the prevailing view of the eighteenth century, God created other beings simply to exhibit his perfections. In Edwards' view, God does not create merely to display his glory, but to give himself to the creature. When God creates "there is something of God actually communicated, some of that Good that is in God." 13 There is a disposition in God "not only to exercise his attributes and perfections," but "also to communicate of his divine good." This "divine good" is the Holy Spirit. For as the Holy Spirit is "that by which God communicates himself, he is as the emitted beams of God's Glory." 14 All the real happiness of the creature is in God, that is, "in the communications, indwelling, and acting of the Spirit of God." 15 The Holy Spirit is the sum of all the good that created beings are capable of receiving. This ultimate good is "Holy Love," the activating essence of divine being, by which he interpenetrates and irradiates the universe. The disposition to communicate himself in plenitude of goodness inheres in the being of God and incites him to create.16 Because God is essentially creative, and therefore creative at every moment of temporal existence, the telos of creativity inheres in the Creator. The end of God's

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p o w e r is his creative action; the e n d of his wisdom is his creative design; the end of his goodness is his communication of good to the creature. T h e wisdom and love comm u n i c a t e d are G o d ' s b e i n g "diffused, overflowing, a n d as it were enlarged."

17

T h i s does n o t imply that G o d has n o

self-consciousness or self-realization apart f r o m the fulfillm e n t of his design in creation, b u t it does mean that " t h e e n d and perfection of G o d ' s attributes does as it were consist in their exercise." the full

18

C r e a t i o n contributes, therefore, to

self-realization of G o d . "

19

A t this point Edwards

w o u l d have parted company w i t h Charles Hartshorne a n d A . N . W h i t e h e a d , a n d the b r a n d of panentheism

some-

times called "surrelativism," according to w h i c h G o d depends u p o n the w o r l d of contingencies for the completion of his being. T h e r e may be, E d w a r d s w o u l d say, unactualized potentialities in the d e p t h of the b e i n g of G o d , b u t there is n o t h i n g left to be desired w h i c h creation can a d d to His being. W r i t i n g o n this subject in the "Miscellanies," he has this to say: As He delights in His own goodness, so He delights in the exercise of His goodness, and therefore He delights to make the creature happy and delights to see him made happy as He delights in exercising goodness or communicating happiness. This is no proper addition to the happiness of God, because 'tis that which He eternally and unalterably had. God, when He beholds His own glory shining forth in His image in the creature, and when He beholds the creature made happy from the exercise of His goodness, is delighted. . . . This delight in God can't properly be said to be received from the creature, because it consists only in a delight in giving to the creature. Neither will it hence follow that God is dependent on the creature for any of His joy, because 'tis His own act only that this delight is dependent on, and the creature is absolutely dependent on God for that excellency and happiness that God delights in. God can't be said to be the more

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happy for the creature, because H e is infinitely happy in Himself. H e is not dependent on the creature for anything, nor has H e received any addition from the creature. 20

Yet, at the same time, there is a sense in which "it can be truly said that God has the more delight for the loveliness and happiness of the creature, viz., as God would be less happy if He were less good, or if it were possible for Him to be hindered in exercising His own goodness or to be hindered from glorifying Himself." 21 In the "surrelativism" of Hartshorne, God has two aspects: the absolute and the relative. This means that in some respects God is independent, in other respects dependent; in certain ways he is perfect, in other ways imperfect. God is an "organism" that functions by receiving and being enriched by new events and new values: T o be himself God does not need this universe, but only a universe, and only contingently does he even contain this particular actual universe. T h e mere essence of God contains no universe. W e are truly 'outside' the divine essence, though inside God. . . . God's existence would make it inevitable that there be a world but only possible that there be just this sort of world. 2 2

Hartshome's purpose in developing a "dipolar theism" is to make room for Whitehead's experience of God as "the fellow-sufferer who understands." 23 Although this particular world is not necessary to the being of God, some kind of world is necessary, for the idea of a bodyless God is to Hartshorne unthinkable. Thus he rejects the traditional theistic belief in the self-sufficiency of God; likewise Whitehead, when he says "a process must be inherent in God's nature, whereby his infinity is acquiring realization." 24 Edwards is content merely to say "it is God's essence to incline to communicate Himself." 25 He takes what we may

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call a middle position in that God finds fulfillment in the realization of his purpose in creating a world. B u t God creates not because he is deficient; he cannot help creating some kind of world just because of his infinite sufficiency. Creation is what Augustine once called "an overplus of God."

26

T h i s idea is clearly expressed in one of Edwards'

unpublished sermons: There is such a thing in the divine nature as a tendency or propensity to communicate of Himself and of His own happiness not from any want or deficiency in God that he should stand in need of any other, but from his infinite fulness, and which doth as it were overflow to the creature. Goodness or an inclination to communicate happiness argues a sufficiency and not a deficiency, for a deficiency rather inclines to receive than communicate.27 In an age of rationalism it was not sufficient to say with the Thomists and Calvinists that God created the world " t o manifest his glory." T h e rationalists might agree and then go on to say that the divine glory is supremely manifested in the mathematical, mechanical universe of Newtonian physics. But Edwards drew very different conclusions from similar premises: he discovered another universe, a cosmos of which God is the throbbing heart, a world dazzling with the brilliance and pulsating with the energy of a living God. Nature is an operational field of living forces. T h e world of facts and laws and moments is not a mere mathematical machine; it is an "organism" alive and resplendent with the omnific glory of God. Edwards had caught the import of the Biblical motif that God is in some sense identical with that which H e communicates. Therefore revelation is not something added to God's nature at a particular point in time as though prior to that time God was not, by nature, self-revealing. T h a t

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which God is in his individuality must be one with that which he is for us. "God Consequent" and "God Primordial," in Whitehead's phrasing, are one and the same. This does not mean that the essence of God is exhaustively revealed in his self-communication; the two aspects of God need not be coextensive. Even in accommodating himself to conditioned modes of being, God remains the inexhaustible fountain of light and love. Edwards argues only for a qualitative continuity between what God is in himself and what he is for us. But there is at the same time a profound sense in which God is qualitatively distinct. There is a transcendent essence, or inmost center, which God cannot share with any creature, yet the wisdom and love, the excellency and happiness, which he does share are the very being of God "diffused" and "overflowing." In an unpublished sermon he is careful to distinguish the "essence" of God from His "fulness." T h e good which God gives to the creature is something of himself, an overplus, yet "not a communication of God's essence" but "a communication of that which the Scriptures call God's fulness." 2 8 In another place, and with a daring stroke, he goes so far as to say "the communication itself, or thing communicated, is something divine, something of God, something of His internal fulness, as the water in the stream is something of the fountain, and as the beams of the sun are something of the sun." 2® There is, as already suggested, a basic difference between Edwards' dynamic theory of divine Self-movement and the Neoplatonic theory of "emanation," notwithstanding the fact that he frequently uses the term. The vision of an infinite Being flowing outward in wisdom and love does not imply a principle of continuity in which all distinctions are

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dissolved. As Augustine had said, "God is not diffused through all things as a quality of the world but as the creative substance of the world H e governs and maintains." 30 T h e Creator-creature distinction is as basic to Edwards' thought as to Augustine's. Sometimes Edwards pictures the creature as a mirror reflecting God's light and beauty back to Himself. In the creature's knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; His fulness is received and returned. . . . The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God, and God is the beginning, middle, and end in this affair."1

T h e world of sense objects, in Edwards' system, is at most a world of "shadows." Its only real significance lies in God's prior intention that it should image forth spiritual realities and beauties and thus serve as a medium of divine communication to created minds. In this way all creation shares, directly or indirectly, in the divine life. But only persons, endowed with perceptive and reflective powers, are capable of participating in the wisdom and love of God wherein His true glory and beauty consist. God's "communication is really only to intelligent beings" since they alone "are the consciousness of the world." 3 2 This statement from the "Miscellanies" blends in with the earlier "Notes on the Mind," in which he had affirmed that "perceiving being only is properly being." 33 T h e physical world exists for the benefit of the spiritual, and spiritual realities exist for the ultimate glory of God. The idea of the unity of all things in God (pan-entheism)

lOO

T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE O F GOD

was by no means a new idea, though it had been lost sight of in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. An early seventeenth-century exponent of the idea was the Cambridge Platonist J o h n Smith, whose Discourses Edwards is known to have read sometime before 1746, and whose influence u p o n him is not inconsiderable. In Smith's essay " T h e Existence and N a t u r e of G o d , " to cite only one parallel, h e describes God as " t h a t Omnipresent Life that penetrates and runs through all things, containing a n d holding all fast together within himself; and therefore, the ancient philosophy was wont rather to say that the world was in God, than that God was in the world." 34 But neither Smith nor Edwards was a pantheist. T h e idea of seeing all things in God, and God in all things, is incompatible with the very different idea of seeing that G o d is all things. T h e r e is, in Edwards' doctrine of divine Self-giving, the conception of God participating in the life and being of man, b u t this very participation depends on the prior fact that G o d creates the subject to whom he communicates himself. H e r e is a full statement of this position: God, in His benevolence to His creatures, cannot have His heart enlarged in such a manner as to take in beings that He finds, who are originally out of Himself, distinct and independent. . . . But He, from His goodness, as it were, enlarges Himself in a more excellent and divine manner. This is by communicating and diffusing Himself; and so instead of finding, making objects of His benevolence; not by taking into Himself what He finds distinct from Himself, and so partaking of their good, and being happy in them, but by flowing forth, and expressing Himself in them, and making them to partake of Him, and rejoicing in Himself expressed in them, and communicated to them.35 Although "we see the most proper image of the beauty of Christ when we see beauty in the h u m a n soul," it is also

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true that his spiritual beauty is reflected in the world of nature. In fact, God "created the world for this very end, to communicate Himself in an image of His own excellency. H e communicates Himself properly to spirits,

and they

only are capable of being proper images of His excellency, for they only are properly

beings." At the same time, how-

ever, He communicates a sort of shadow or glimpse of His excellencies to bodies which are but the shadow of beings and not real beings. He who, by His immediate influence, gives being every moment, and by His Spirit actuates the world, because He inclines to communicate Himself and His excellencies, doth doubtless communicate His excellency to bodies, as far as there is any consent or analogy.39 Understood in this sense "the beauties of nature are really emanations or shadows of the excellency of the Son of God." Here is a passage reminiscent of Francis of Assisi. When we are delighted with flowery meadows and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see His love and purity. So the green trees and fields, and singing of birds, are the emanations of His infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and vines are shadows of His beauty and loveliness. The crystal rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of His favor, grace and beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and goodness; and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gendeness. . . . That beauteous light with which the world is filled in a clear day is a lively shadow of His spotless holiness, and happiness and delight in communicating Himself. 37 Raptures like these grew out of Edwards' mystical communings with God along the banks of the Hudson River

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GOD

while an assistant pastor in New York City, or on his daily walks in the Northampton woods. This immediate sense of the divine glory resembles that of Hebrew poets, for whom God's glory in and behind his works was a vivid reality. Edwards had the soul of a mystic. His mysticism ran deep and was never divorced from a profound sense of God in history. He lived intensely and was, as one critic has described him, "violent in godliness." "Supposing there was never but one complete Christian," he wrote in his private diary, "resolved with all my might to be that one. " 3 8 His interest in nature, then, was always in terms of imagery. "As to the corporeal world, the sweetest and most charming beauty of it is its resemblance of spiritual beauties. The reason is that spiritual beauties are infinitely the greatest, and bodies being but the shadows of beings, they must be so much the more charming as they shadow forth spiritual beauties." 39 This is an oft-recurring note in nearly all his writings. It is obviously an outgrowth of his early mystical ontology in which God is seen to be the sole Reality and therefore the transcendent power of being in everything that lives. Only that is real in our world which can be experienced as the immediate agency of divine Being. Even the soul of man is a true image of God's beauty only when it is possessed of a semblance of divine wisdom and love. Spiritual beauties are the highest "images," or reflections, of divine Beauty, for they are the most immediate communications of God's transcendent beauty. All objects of sense are mere "shadows of being" since they are not as much the direct result of God's immediate creativity. It is "agreeable to God's wisdom that it should be so, that the inferior and shadowy parts of his works should be made to represent those things that are more real and excellent,

T H E SELF-CIVING NATURE OF GOD

spiritual and divine." 40 Sensible objects derive their only significance from their "consent or analogy" to spiritual beauties. We can, of course, to a degree appreciate them in and for themselves, apart from their analogy to the divine qualities, but when we do so we are enjoying a mere shadow of being and not Being-itself. Yet Edwards' position, instead of underrating the value of the natural world, raises it to the level of a potential sacrament. His was a dynamic understanding of nature as a field of living forces. Nature and spirit are linked together to form one great organism. Like Friedrich Schelling in the next century, nature was to Edwards "visible spirit," and spirit "invisible nature." He had caught a vision of the supernal beauty of God's spiritual presence in every sort of natural harmony and symmetry. In natural objects of beauty he saw a shadowy image—but nevertheless an image—of a higher beauty, an analogue of the "beauty of holiness." T h e spiritually real "is the end, and as it were the substance and consummation" of the "more external and transitory part" of the universe. "The material and natural world is typical of the moral, spiritual, and intelligent world, or the city of God." 41 The realm of human experience is one of "shadows of divine things." Nothing is merely what it appears to the physical senses; everything points beyond itself and is symbolic of larger meanings. is in close harmony with the authentic Puritan idea—prevalent in Owen, Sibbes, Goodwin, and others—that God's glory is everywhere perspicuous in creation, and that if one will but contemplate God's works, through eyes of faith, he cannot escape the confrontation of His glory. Edwards' doctrine of creative immediacy gave THIS VIEW OF NATURE

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THE SELF-GIVING NATURE OF GOD

a fresh dynamic, however, to Calvin's idea of revelation in creation. Nature is not God; but, on the other hand, neither is it inert matter over against God. His view of God's immediacy in the natural world represents, perhaps more than any other conception he held, the authentic Puritan strain in his thinking. Perry Miller quotes a passage from a representative Puritan writer, which he calls "an epitome of the Puritan mind," in which the Puritan states that man "is to seek out, and find this wisdom of God in the world . . .; for the world, and the creatures therein are like a book wherein God's wisdom is written, and there must we seek it out." 42 Edwards' work Images of Divine Things was subtitled The Language and Lessons of Nature or The Book of Nature and Common Providence. He inherited from the Puritan tradition the acceptance of the natural world as God's providence in operation. In the language of Miller: " T h e Puritan felt that unless he could see the divine purpose in the phenomenal world he had failed to interpret his facts correctly. For his nature was a revelation of the divine order which had pre-existed in the mind of God before it was incarnated in matter, and its highest value was symbolic." 43 If the visible world can be seen as a medium of divine communication with the worshiper, then the understanding of its operations and the appreciation of its beauties become an essential part of Christian knowledge. Miller is correct in his judgment that "Puritanism was not only a religious creed, it was a philosophy and a metaphysic; it was an organization of man's whole life, emotional and intellectual, to a degree which has not been sustained by any denomination stemming from it." 44 Its central purpose was "to bring

THE SELF-GIVING NATURE OF GOD

men face to face with what Puritanism always demands that they face, the divinity of divinity." 45 If this is the "Puritan mind," Edwards was its epitome. As the seventeenth century progressed, however, the conviction grew that God was limited by his own inviolable laws which he established at the first creation. "The Newtonian triumph," Miller continues, "established the concept of a necessary and inviolable system of law which God himself cannot break even though he created it. All deists were followers of Newton, and there are deistic tendencies perceptible in Puritan writings, though the more central orthodoxy strove to reconcile God's sovereign freedom and the reign of law." 46 By the turn of the century the deistic principle had taken deep roots in both England and New England. Many so-called Arminians became deists, and most deists were already Arminians. Both were suffering, in Edwards' estimation, from the same philosophical rationalism from which he sought to turn them back to the original Puritan consciousness of the immediate presence and creative agency of God in nature and the human soul. T h e prevailing thought mood in New England was a sort of "Platonized Puritanism" resulting in part from the rationalizing influence of the Ramists, and from which it was an easy and almost painless transition to deism. Unfortunately, the more the Antinomians and Quakers of the extreme right wing emphasized private revelations, the more the rationalist Puritans repudiated mysticism in any form. Edwards, without however joining forces with the "Enthusiasts," was attempting to reconstruct this Platonized Calvinism in terms of his mystical doctrine of divine immediacy.

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T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE O F GOD

In addition to the rationalism of the Ramists and the Cambridge Platonists, as well as the rising tide of deism, there was the mediating position of the Federalists, or Covenant Theologians, who conceived of the relation of the human soul to God in terms of a legal contract. This radical position was held only by the more extreme "Federalists," however, and their scheme of interpretation seemed compatible with either Calvinism or Arminianism. John Wollebius, Francis Turretin, and Petrus van Mastricht, for instance, whose Latin tomes underlay Puritan writings, were more Biblical in their conception of the covenant. 47 But, as it was formulated by William Ames, William Perkins, and John Preston, this strange theology began to represent a progressive departure from the Hebraic conception of covenant understood in terms of promise and command, and tended toward the common-law conception of a formal agreement of legal validity, requiring assent and obligation of both parties to the contract. In the hands of rationalists it proved quite compatible with deism, since it left room for God to work in the soul according to natural law, natural reason, and secondary causes. Quite naturally, there could be no real opposition between this form of rationalist Puritanism and the natural religion of the deists. Perry Miller concludes a discussion of Federalism with the following estimate. T h e subtle casuistry of this dialectic is altogether obvious. Yet the spectacle of these men struggling in the coils of their doctrine, desperately striving on the one hand to maintain the subordination of humanity to God without unduly abasing human values, and on the other hand to vaunt the powers of the human intellect without losing the sense of the divine transcendence, vividly recreates what might be called the central problem of the seventeenth century, as it was confronted by the Puritan mind. 48

T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE OF GOD

Among Edwards' favorite authors were John Owen and Richard Sibbes, whose writings are perhaps the purest examples of the original Puritan spirit, being singularly free from the rationalizing and legalizing influences of the intervening years. What Miller remarks concerning Puritanism in general is particularly true of the earlier non-Ramist, non-Federalist English Puritans, that "phenomena had significance because they were intentional. Man's duty was merely to observe the event and find out the purpose, but not to set his heart upon it." 4 9 It was this spirit with which Edwards consciously aligned himself. Sibbes had taught a century before, paraphrasing Calvin, that "the whole world is a theatre of the glory of God." 5 0 T h e emphasis on the Holy Spirit and divine immediacy in creation and conversion, characteristic of Sibbes, Owen, and Smith, finds its recrudescence in Edwards as late as the mid-eighteenth century. If the original Puritan mind was blurred in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it was never quite lost. T h a t it did eventually disintegrate is not, as some suppose, a matter of historical necessity but of a lack of social consciousness and an adequate philosophic orientation. There is little to be gained from modern historical research into Puritanism if we succeed only in proving that the Puritan was, by modern standards, a rationalist, but at the same time fail to feel the force and accept the challenge of the Puritan's philosophy of religion. K. B. Murdock, in a searching comparison of literature and theology in colonial New England, says: The Puritans' theology was shaped to the nature of existence, as they saw it. This suggests a query as to whether contemporary religion can boast of any similarly consistent relation to the actual facts of current life, and as to whether it has any devel-

io8

T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE O F GOD

oped myth or set of symbols that can typify imaginatively and emotionally in dramatic terms its principles and standards. 51

T h i s is the challenge of Puritanism to our time: Is our religious experience deep and firm enough to support a genuinely effective theology? If not, we are not likely to give to our religion the vitality the Puritan gave to his. the moral and spiritual problem of his age in terms of the divorce of words from their true meanings. 62 He saw that the unity of our concepts with experience is possible only as everything in this vast and colorful cosmos—whether temporal event, spatial fact, or spiritual communication—is seen as an expression of the Logic that inheres in the divine Being. Ideas, objects, and events become intelligible only when this fundamental harmony is envisaged. " T h e Language and Lessons of Nature" are meaningless to the unenlightened and unregenerate. Miller refers to this work as the beginning of a "treatise on divine rhetoric" in which Edwards "was responding most creatively to the challenge of his time." 6 3 Here Edwards was consciously opposing the "spiritualizations of nature" characteristic of Cotton Mather. Spiritualizing nature was a habit, on the part of New England preachers, of reading into the objects of nature fanciful meanings merely for purposes of sermon illustration. T o Edwards this was a vulgarization of God's creation, which reduced it to "a disjointed series of phenomena." He saw nature rather as a coherent and intentional order whose harmony is preestablished in the mind of God. In his work on images he was restating, with an attempt at radical reintegration, Calvin's conviction of the objective revelation of God in the created world. On his works God has, according to Calvin,

EDWARDS INTERPRETED

T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE O F GOD

log

inscribed his glory in characters so clear, unequivocal, and striking, that the most illiterate and stupid cannot exculpate themselves by the plea of ignorance. . . . whithersoever you turn your eyes, there is not an atom of the world in which you cannot behold some brilliant sparks at least of his glory. . . . the exact symmetry of the universe is a mirror, in which we may contemplate the otherwise invisible God.64 Calvin is careful to add that, although God is everywhere revelatory, "we have no eyes to discern him, unless they be illuminated through faith by an internal revelation of Spiritus G o d . " 8 6 It was clearly not to the testimonium Sancti that Edwards objected, but to certain mediating doctrines of Protestant scholastics and "Federalists" who, with their stress on "means of grace," had in a sense prepared the way for deism. T h e deists were divorcing facts from their true meanings, thought Edwards, when they declared the sufficiency of natural law. On this point he sets his favorite logical trap for Tindal: But how weak and impertinent is this arguing, that because the law of nature is perfect, therefore the light of nature is sufficient. To say, that the law of nature is perfect, yea, absolutely perfect, is no more than to say, that which is naturally fit and right in itself, is indeed right; and that what is in itself, or in its own nature, perfectly and absolutely right, is absolutely right. But this is an empty, insipid kind of doctrine. It is an idle way of spending time, ink, and paper, to spend them in proving, that what is true is in its own nature perfectly true, is perfectly good; and what is in its nature perfectly true is perfectly true; or that what is, is, and is as it is. But this is all that can be meant by the law of nature being perfect.58 All this, Edwards continues, is far from any reference to the question whether we have by mere nature, without any divine communication, all the light we need to know clearly

1 IO

T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE O F COD

and fully what is right. This was the question T i n d a l sought to answer, and the above was his main argument which Edwards reduced to absurdity. "What, according to the nature of things, is fittest and best," Edwards concludes, "may be most perfect; and yet our natural knowledge of this may be most imperfect!" Here again he aligns himself with Calvin in distinguishing an objective disclosure of God's glory in creation from a subjective apprehension of the same. He was resolved, as Miller rightly points out, "not to let science itself, as a mere description of phenomena, take the place of a philosophy or theology of nature." 57 He seeks a coherence which at once transcends and is immediately present in the objects of sense. This he found in his own intimate experience of God as the intelligibility of all phenomena. A mind possessed of what he calls the "spiritual sense" may perceive the course of nature and the impact of events as a series of "emanations" of the divine Being. T o see the visible symbols of God's presence in "anything that being from H i m has some resemblance of Him," is the highest act of human apprehension. 6 8 T h e greatness, distance, and motion, etc. of this great universe has almost an omnipotent power upon the imagination; by it will man be chilled with the vast idea. But the greatness of vast expanse, immense distances, prodigious bulk, and rapid motion is but a little, trivial, and childish greatness in comparison of the noble, refined, exalted, divine, spiritual greatness. Yea, those are but the shadows of greatness and are worthless except as they conduce to true and real greatness and excellency, and manifest the power and wisdom of God. When we think of the sweet harmony of the parts of the corporeal world, it fills us with such astonishment that the soul is ready to break. Yet take all that infinite variety of sweet proportions, harmonious motions, and delightful correspondencies that are in this whole company of

T H E SELF-GIVING NATURE O F GOD

11 I

bodies, and they are all but shadows of excellency in comparison of those beauties and harmonies that may be in our finite spirits. . . . The glories of astronomy and natural philosophy consist in the harmony of the parts of the corporeal shadow of a world; the glories of religion consist in the sweet harmony of the greater and more-real world within themselves [finite spirits], with one another, and with the infinite fountain and original of them. 58

Images of spiritual realities are not mere effects from prior causes. T h e difference between an image and an effect lies in the quality of the apprehension. T h e subjective element conditions every interpretation of phenomena. Here again Edwards is at one with Calvin. All creation is resplendent with the munificent glory of God, but this does not constitute communication unless the mind is illuminated from within. A static effect becomes a living image to the spiritually enlightened. T h e h u m a n mind, when possessed of true apprehension, becomes itself an analogue of divine intelligence. T h e new element Edwards adds to Calvin's doctrine of general revelation is—in addition to immediacy—the idea that the light from enlightened reason adds substantially to the revelation. T h e correspondence, therefore, between our ideas and reality depends upon the degree of our participation in the all-comprehending mind of God. Edwards never departed from the definition of truth he laid down in the early notes as "the consistency or agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God." 60 This consistency depends on divine illumination and human apprehension. A man who undertakes to interpret the phenomena of human experience without divine light is, according to Edwards, like a man who goes into a garden at night and feels his way in the dark from plant to plant, comparing the distances. "But he who sees

112

THE SELF-GIVING NATURE OF GOD

by divine light is like a man that views the garden when the sun shines upon it. There is, as it were, a light cast upon the ideas of spiritual things in the mind of the believer which makes them appear clear and real which before were but faint, obscure representations." 81 Here is no internal conflict between the divine and the rational. Precisely because nature has no independent significance; because it is a divine "image" and not a mere mechanical effect; for the reason that nature and history and humanity point beyond themselves to the cause and power of their being—on these grounds an apotheosis of nature is unthinkable. Edwards envisages the sublime unity of all experience in God. The relation between God and the "images" is potentially sacramental. Although our knowledge of God is necessarily analogical, the world of analogies is objectively a continuous sacrament in which God confronts us through an immediate and vivid disclosure of His dynamic presence. God is immediately creative in the image, and it is therefore a medium of his self-communication.

VI. A "NEW SENSE OF THINGS"

It is for the sake of the interior eyes whose blindness consists in not understanding, that hearts are purified by faith (Acts 15:9), that they may be opened and may be made more and more clear of vision. For although, unless he understand somewhat, no man can believe in God, nevertheless by the very faith whereby he believes, he is helped to the understanding of greater things. For there are some things which we do not believe unless we understand them, and there are other things which we do not understand unless we believe them. . . . Our understanding therefore contributes to the comprehension of that which it believes, and faith contributes to the belief of that which is comprehends. SAINT AUCUSTINE * CONSCIOUS P A R T I C I P A T I O N we may discover our highest fulfillment in the very end for which God created the universe. But the meaningfulness of our being is in direct proportion to the depth of our knowledge and love of God. "For this end," says Edwards, "God has placed us on this earth." 1 "Religion is the very business . . . of intelligent beings." T o know and love God is man's raison d'être. "Religion must be the end of the creation." 2

THROUGH

T h e deists were reducing religion to the rationally demonstrable, squeezing out its mystical element. T h e "Enthusiasts," on the other side, were appealing to irrational emotions. In opposition to the antimystical rationalism of the deists as well as to the nonmystical intellectualism of • Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXVIII, Sermones xviii, 3; quoted in Erich Przywara, ed„ An Augustine Synthesis (London, Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 59.

ii4

A " N E W SENSE O F

THINGS"

orthodox Puritanism, Edwards affirmed that "true religion, in great part, consists in the affections."

3

T h i s is the cen-

tral theme of his classic in religious psychology, the

tise Concerning

Religious

AffectionsIn

Trea-

an "age of rea-

son" he dared to assert—without, however, appealing to unreasoned emotions—that the "heart" is "the principle and original seat" of religious consciousness, 5 for emotions are "the spring of men's actions." In the same treatise he summarizes his position on the function of the human faculties. God has endued the soul with two faculties: one is that by which it is capable of perception and speculation, or by which it discerns, and views, and judges of things; which is called the understanding. The other faculty is that by which the soul does not merely perceive and view things, but is some way inclined with respect to the things it views or considers; either is inclined to them, or is disinclined and averse from them; or is the faculty by which the soul does not behold things, as an indifferent unaffected spectator, but either as liking or disliking, pleased or displeased, approving or rejecting. This faculty is called by various names; it is sometimes called the inclination: and as it has respect to the actions that are determined and governed by it, is called the will: and the mind, with regard to the exercises of this faculty is often called the heart. . . . And, it is to be noted, that they are these more vigorous and sensible exercises of this faculty that are called the affections.6 He agreed with Locke that we should not attempt to divide the mind into separate compartments, but simply recognize the several interacting mental processes. But Edwards perceived more than this. H e saw an aesthetic element in every act of understanding, as well as a cognitive element in every act of will. " T h e r e is consciousness, or understanding," he affirmed, "in the very nature of the will or act of the soul," so that when duly possessed of a "spiri-

A "NEW

SENSE OF

>'5

THINCS"

tual sense" it becomes "a seeing or understanding will." Conversely, "the mind feels when it thinks."

8

7

Especially

as regards the depth of the religious passion there is no "clear distinction between the two faculties of understanding and will as acting distinctly and separately."

9

When the mind is sensible of the sweet beauty and amiableness of a thing, that implies a sensibleness of sweetness and delight in the presence of the idea of it: and this sensibleness of the amiableness or delightfulness of beauty, carries in the very nature of

it the sense of the heart.™ T h e cognitive and the volitional powers of the mind are complementary functions of personality. T h e r e can be no love without knowledge, for "the heart cannot be set upon an object of which there is no idea in the understanding."

11

Such is the nature of man that "nothing can come at the heart, but through the door of the understanding." An act of understanding is "implied in all reasonable affection."

12

On the other hand, it is equally true that " n o light in the understanding is good, which does not produce affection in the heart."

13

In some such "reasonable

the whole of religion." EDWARDS

consists

affection

14

ACKNOWLEDGES,

with Locke, that much of our

so-called "knowledge" is bare "cogitation" in which we substitute external signs or arbitrary names for actual ideas. 15 In such a process of verbal substitution,

Locke

taught, we "almost as readily excite certain ideas as if the objects themselves did actually affect the senses."

16

T h i s is

especially true, according to Edwards, of much of our knowledge of things of a religious nature, and it is the source of much error and confusion in our thinking. And yet, "we are under a necessity of thus putting signs in our

n6

A " N E W SENSE O F T H I N G S "

minds instead of the actual ideas of the things," partly because of the difficulty of exciting the actual ideas of spiritual realities, and partly because without these "signs" our thought processes would be so slow as to be almost useless in practical experience.17 "This way of thinking by signs, unless it is abused to an indulgence of a slothful inattentive disposition, well serves as to many of the common purposes of thinking; for in many respects we, without the actual presence of the idea, know how to use the sign as if it were the idea itself." 18 On the other hand, "the force or strength of a mind consists very much in an ability to excite actual ideas, so as to have them lively and clear; and in its comprehension, whereby it is able to excite several at once, to that degree as to see their connection and relations." 19 God's knowledge, in which we may under certain conditions participate, is of this superior quality. But thinking by artificial signs, a characteristic of finitude, is by itself "mere cogitation without any proper apprehension of the things thought of." 2 0 In real apprehension, by contrast, "the mind has a direct ideal view, or contemplation of the thing thought of." An important factor contributing to the "decay of vital piety" in religion, as he termed it, was this artificial separation of the sign from the thing signified. Philosophically it amounted to the separation of the science of knowledge from the problem of being, a consummation devoutly desired by Locke and his disciples. Quite apart from Locke, however, the cleavage between symbols and their true meanings, as observed in the previous chapter, was apparent in New England pulpits where meanings were often fabricated out of nature and history mainly for purposes of sermon illustration. T h e significance of phenomena was gradually

A "NEW

SENSE O F THINGS"

117

being reduced to their instrumental value, and this in the name of Christianity. It was not a very long step from this to the conclusion some drew from Locke's view, namely, that all meaning is arbitrary, the result of mere social convention. T h i s consequence led in time to the positivism and instrumentalism of our own day. In view of the new world-picture of N e w t o n i a n physics, Edwards perceived more acutely than his contemporaries that facts and ideas must be reunited if Christianity was to speak cogently to the new age; yet without, at the same time, either deifying nature or naturalizing Deity. W h e n a person "makes use of representations of spiritual things in the constitution of the world," he says, these things ought not to be regarded merely "as illustrations of his meaning, but as illustrations and evidences of the truth of what he says."

21

Empty words are mere sounds. T h e semantic prob-

lem is rooted in the inveterate habit of the m i n d to substitute artificial signs in place of actual ideas. T h e s e signs tend to interpose themselves between the mind and its object, thus clouding our vision of what the real plot is all about. It is this interposition that causes us to accept the phenomenal as the real and the spiritual as merely nominal. T h i s facility the mind has for making use of an external sign or sensible image as though it were the actual idea is often the source of much error in religion. T h e idea of G o d in our minds may be far removed from a living experience of God. Yet we may deceive ourselves into thinking that it is G o d that we experience directly, when in fact it is only an external sign that interposes itself between our minds and God. As Edwards saw it, this was the source of much of the religious apathy in New England. People retained the theological vocabulary without the actual experience of

IL8

A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

divine grace. Concepts and creedal statements were divorced from their intended meanings. What was needed was a scientific analysis of theological language. T h e idea of love, for example, involves a new experience of love if the idea is to be truly represented in the mind. Otherwise we have an idea of the effects of love without the presence of love itself. T h e mind must never rest either upon some previous experience or upon the experiences of other people. There is no substitute for a firsthand, personal experience. One cannot think spiritual thoughts without having simultaneously the spiritual experiences that support and give rise to such thoughts. 22 There is no better illustration of Edwards' concern that the terms we use should express firsthand experience than the stand he took in what has come to be called the "Northampton Controversy." His insistence that a verbal profession of faith be accompanied by some evidence of a living spiritual experience led finally to his removal from the Northampton pulpit. In a letter to Peter Clark of Salem Village, dated May 7, 1750, he wrote: I can conceive of no such virtue in a certain set of words, that it is proper, merely on the making these sounds, to admit persons to Christian sacraments, without any regard to any pretended meaning of these sounds; nor can I think that any institution of Christ has established any such terms of admission into the Christian Church . . . for I call that a profession of godliness, which is a profession of the great things wherein godliness consists.23

John E. Smith has drawn a helpful comparison between Edwards in eighteenth-century New England and Kierkegaard in nineteenth-century Denmark. They were alike concerned with the problem of the theoretical distance between the thinking self and what it seeks to understand. " T h e es-

A " N E W SENSE OF

THINGS"

«19

sence of the theoretical attitude," says Smith, "is to ignore the peculiar bearing of w h a t is known or contemplated upon the life and destiny of the one w h o knows." 2* Edwards' unique doctrine of the "sense of the heart" enabled him to involve the thinking self in the thing thought, without, however, r u l i n g out—as Kierkegaard tended to do—the significance of the rational element. Existentialist theology and philosophy today might find instruction in Edwards' broad conception of human understanding as inseparable from the deepest emotional and volitional powers of the mind. Spiritual understanding is not merely theoretical in the sense of being detached from the other processes of the mind. Neither is it merely theoretical in the sense of being confined to the conceptual grasp of general truths about religion. It is derived from a firsthand experience of a direct and personal encounter with that Reality to which all truly religious experience points. It cannot be derived merely from piling u p more and more general concepts deduced from the experiences of others or even from one's own previous experience. N o t h i n g short of firsthand, immediate contact can lead a m a n to see the specific relation which the general truths of the Christian religion sustain to his own personal life and destiny. Edwards lays d o w n a basic distinction which figures large in all his reasoning on the subject of the relation of the understanding and volition in religious experience. It is the distinction between mere "notional" or "speculative" knowledge and "sensible knowledge."

25

T h e first includes

"all the modes of mere discerning, judging, or speculation," and "all that understanding that is without any proper ideal apprehension or view, or all understanding of mental

120

A "NEW

SENSE O F

things of either faculty, that is only by signs."

26

THINGS"

I n addi-

tion to this it includes also all ideal views of things that are merely intellectual, or appertain only to the faculty of understanding; i.e., all that understanding of things that does not consist in, or imply, some motion of the will, or in other words (to speak figuratively) some feeling of the heart, is mere speculative knowledge, whether it be an ideal apprehension of them, or no. 27 "Sensible k n o w l e d g e , " in contradistinction, is " t h a t w h i c h consists in the sense of the heart," and includes all ideal views of value, goodness, or beauty in the object—qualities w h i c h Edwards sums u p in the term " e x c e l l e n c e " — a n d their opposites. All knowledge of this sort, as it is of things that concern the heart, or the will and affections, so it all relates to the good or evil that the sensible knowledge of things of this nature involves; and nothing is called a sensible knowledge upon any other account but the sense, or kind of inward tasting or feeling, of sweetness or pleasure, bitterness or pain, that is implied in it, or arises from it.2® A c c o r d i n g to this distinction, a m a n may h a v e a purely theoretical k n o w l e d g e of the beauty of an object, b u t if his heart is u n m o v e d this knowledge is bare speculation.

A

true ideal apprehension of the beauty of an object "carries in it an act of the will, or inclination or spirit of the m i n d , as well as of the understanding."

29

C o m m e n t i n g o n Ed-

wards' distinction between g e n u i n e and pseudoreligious experience, R i c h a r d N i e b u h r says " i t was, w h e n g e n u i n e , a l o v i n g of G o d rather than a believing that one o u g h t to love him, active concern for the n e i g h b o r rather than acceptance of the statement that love of n e i g h b o r is very good."

30

A " N E W SENSE OF T H I N G S "

121

is OBVIOUS from the outset that Edwards is using the term "sense" with a metaphorical meaning. One cannot therefore discover the religious significance of "the sense of the heart" by simply rereading Locke's Essay or even Hutcheson's Inquiry. The concept has a religious content beyond the reach of Locke's "internal sense" or Hutcheson's "moral sense." Edwards' "new sense" was, in a way, an answer to Locke's sensationalism, while its ethical corollary was a reply to the moralism of Hutcheson. In any case, it would not be necessary to point to either Locke or Hutcheson as the source of Edwards' concept, or even of his terminology. T h e Puritan writers frequently employed the analogy of the immediacy of sense perception as well as that of aesthetic appreciation in describing the phenomenon of conversion. "It is knowledge with a taste," according to Richard Sibbes. "God giveth knowledge per modum gustus. When things are to us as in themselves, then things have a sweet relish." 3 1 T h e Holy Spirit, says John Owen, "gives alaB-qaw TrviVfxaTLKTjvt a spiritual sense, . . . a taste of the things themselves upon the mind, heart, and conscience." 3 2 IT

Probably the most singular influence, apart from the Bible, on Edwards' conviction of divine immediacy in the soul was the Theoretico-practica Theologia of Petrus van Mastricht. In a private letter he praised it as an example of ideal balance between Calvinistic theory and piety. As a "universal system of divinity," he wrote to Joseph Bellamy, Mastricht's work was "better than Turretine or any other book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion." 3 3 He undoubtedly found support in Mastricht for his conviction of an immediate divine light in the souls of the regenerate. Mastricht's chapter on regeneration may even have suggested to him the basis for his doctrine of the

122

A " N E W SENSE O F T H I N G S "

heart's "sense" in which knowledge and love are complementary aspects of a single spiritual apprehension. Something like Augustine's theory of divine illumination is perceptible in Mastricht's treatment of conversion: This spiritual life, animating and quickening the whole regenerate man, and all the several parts and faculties of him, hath different names according to those different faculties. As it takes place in the understanding it is called a new spirit, and spiritual light, and the bestowment of it by regeneration is called illumination, and those who are illuminated are called children of light. . . . This spiritual light of the regenerate effects the simple understanding or perception, by which they know spiritual objects, not only speculatively as true, but practically as good. It effects the judgement, so that the regenerate judge concerning the goodness of spiritual things, not only as to the general position (in thesi), what is good in a general view; but also under all the particular circumstances and connections of that truth (in hypothesi), what is good and profitable for them at this very time, all circumstances considered. 3 4

Actually what Edwards was doing—with the aid of Mastricht, Owen, Sibbes, Smith, and others—was to reintroduce the forgotten element of immediate experience into the Puritan doctrine of spiritual illumination. His originality lay in his precise formulation of the doctrine of immediate perception as well as in his ability to recognize that this was the missing ingredient in the piety of New England. His fragmentary essay " T h e Sense of the H e a r t " is no mere reiteration of Lockean empiricism. 35 H e subtitled it "Spiritual Knowledge or Conviction," and he later incorporated most of the material from this essay into his more extensive treatments of related subjects in the Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, the "Treatise on Grace," and the Essay on the Trinity. " T h e Sense of the Heart" is basi-

A

"NEW

123

SENSE OF THINGS"

cally a study in the nature of our k n o w l e d g e of G o d . H e draws the important conclusion that the "spiritual sense" does not involve the reception of any new sense data b u t simply a new perspective and appreciation of the transcendent qualities in the object already accessible to the m i n d . T h e c o m b i n a t i o n of these qualities and the enlighte n m e n t of the m i n d to perceive them constitute the all-det e r m i n i n g factors. T h e "spiritual sensation" calls for a spiritual o b j e c t conscious to the m i n d , together w i t h a profoundly religious appreciation of its spiritual excellence. I n another place h e summarizes this in a way that shows h o w his interest is more w i t h "the divine object of religious experie n c e " a n d less w i t h "its subjective 'feel.' "

36

T h e predominance of the love of God in the hearts of good men, is more from the nature of the object loved, and the nature of the principle of true love, than the degree of the principle. T h e object is one of supreme loveliness; immensely above all other objects in worthiness of regard; and it is by such a transcendent excellency, that He is God, and worthy to be regarded and adored as God; and he that truly loves God, loves Him as God: true love acknowledges Him to be God, or to be divinely and supremely excellent; and must arise from some knowledge, sense, and conviction of His worthiness of supreme respect.37 T o Edwards, the familiar five senses, a n d the mind's reflection

on their

findings,

are not e n o u g h to account for

the v i v i d experience of G o d . H e feels it necessary to posit a supraphysical "sense." In the "Miscellanies" he defines this as " t h e heart's sense of the divine excellency of spiritual things."

38

T h e physical senses, by which w e acquire most

of o u r simple ideas, are supplemented and supported by a special i n w a r d sense whereby we may discern right and w r o n g and a p p r e h e n d truth a n d beauty. Edwards' study of L o c k e , instead of confining h i m w i t h i n the narrow bounda-

124

A " n e w sense of

things"

ries of the physical senses, as it did for many others, liberated him from this limited horizon and opened before him a new dimension of reality. T h e "new sense of things" is a sort of donum superadditum which enables the mind to grasp the spiritual dimension of life which is at once higher and deeper than the system of nature in which all of us are involved. This apprehension comes by an ideal union of the cognitive and aesthetic powers of the mind. "The beauty and sweetness of the objects draws on the faculties, and draws forth their exercises; so that reason itself is under far greater advantages for its proper and free exercises, and to attain its proper end, free of darkness and delusion." 39 Locke's concern was to liberate the physical sciences from outmoded habits of metaphysical disputation and to preserve practical piety from the unnecessary sophistication of dogmatic theology. Innocent as this purpose was, he did not dream that his method would lead to the eventual division of philosophy and theology as seen in radical empiricism and logical positivism. But Locke's originality lay in his assumption that questions of human understanding could be discussed apart from metaphysical questions. We face today another form of essentially the same problem Edwards faced in the eighteenth century, for philosophical empiricism has been a threat to Christianity ever since the high Middle Ages. Edwards was a severe critic of uncontrolled empiricism, without however denying the importance of the empirical factor in the knowing process. Although he agrees with Locke that there is "no reason to believe that the soul thinks before the senses have furnished it with ideas to think on," he does not share agreement with the central point Locke is concerned to prove, namely,

A "NEW

SENSE O F

THINGS"

125

that "ideas in the understanding are coeval with sensation." 40 Edwards emphatically denies that the knowledge content of the "sense of the heart" arises merely from the mind's reflection upon its external ideas.41 Although Miller, in his intellectual biography of Edwards, has in the opinion of some pressed much too hard his thesis that Edwards was a thoroughgoing empiricist, nevertheless he has in another place made the very wise observation that Edwards responded not to the Locke who was to father Utilitarianism but to the Locke who opened for him, as for Berkeley, the vision of a universe organized about the act of perception. That the knowable was confined to the perceptible did not mean for Edwards—whatever it may have meant for Locke—merely that the mind was shut up within five meager senses; it meant instead a new and exhilarating approach to reality. 42

According to Edwards' analysis, the spiritually enlightened have a "new inward perception or sensation of their minds, entirely different in its nature and kind, from any thing that ever their minds were the subjects of before they were sanctified." That is to say, "there is some new sensation or perception of the mind, which is entirely of a new sort, and which could be produced by no exalting, varying or compounding of that kind of perceptions or sensations which the mind had before; or there is what some metaphysicians call a new simple idea." 43 Not only is this spiritual sensation extraordinary with respect to "the manner of its coming into the mind," but "the sensation itself is totally diverse from all that men have, or can have, in a state of nature." 44 T h e "spiritual sense" is set over and "above any sensation which it is possible a man should have by any natural sense," for even though our "external ideas" may enter the mind in some unusual way, they lack

126

A "NEW

the transcendent

q u a l i t y of spiritual

SENSE OF

THINGS"

apprehension.

The

c o n t e n t of the idea w h i c h floods the m i n d in spiritual apprehension is the " i n f i n i t e e x c e l l e n c y " of G o d . It is n o t s i m p l y a p e r c e p t i o n of fact o r relation, b u t of m e a n i n g a n d v a l u e . T h e idea is n o t a f a d e d impression of the real o b j e c t , o r a mere copy of an o r i g i n a l , as in the theory of representative perception, b u t it is a p r o f o u n d a n d p e n e t r a t i n g insight into the real n a t u r e o f the m i n d ' s o b j e c t .

"Though

e x t e r n a l ideas, t h r o u g h m a n ' s m a k e a n d f r a m e , d o ordinarily in some degree attend

spiritual experiences, yet these

ideas are no part of their spiritual e x p e r i e n c e , any m o r e t h a n the m o t i o n of the b l o o d , a n d b e a t i n g of the pulse, that attend ence."

experiences, are

a p a r t of

spiritual

experi-

45

Here is, as it were, a new spiritual . . . sensation, which is in its whole nature different from any former kinds of sensation of the mind, as tasting is diverse from any of the other senses; and something is perceived by a true saint, in the exercise of this new sense of mind in spiritual and divine things, as entirely diverse from any thing that is perceived in them, by natural men, as the sweet taste of honey is diverse from the ideas men get of honey by only looking on it, and feeling of it. 46 W i t h reference to the e x t e r n a l w o r l d , sense data reach the m i n d , in E d w a r d s ' scheme, not as b r u t e facts w a i t i n g , as it were, to be d e f i n e d a n d interpreted, b u t as facts already charged w i t h m e a n i n g in v i r t u e of their preestablished h a r m o n y in the m i n d of G o d . T h e " s p i r i t u a l sense" o p e n s the m i n d to a vision of this d i v i n e d e f i n i t i o n a n d intention in a n d b e h i n d the facts of o u r e x p e r i e n c e . I n so f a r as this vision d e p e n d s o n the p r e d i s p o s i t i o n of the m i n d to grasp the aesthetic and o n t o l o g i c a l v a l u e of the o b j e c t , it is immediate. It does not d e p e n d o n a r g u m e n t or medi-

A

" N E W SENSE O F

127

THINGS"

tation. T h e power to envisage the spiritual meaning and significance of ordinary facts and their relations—in other words, to discern the divine image in the facts—involves a crisis of perception in the inward man. Knowledge is therefore more than the mere theoretical recording of the presence of an external object; it is an immediate recognition of and attraction to the divine beauty in the object. His study of Locke led him to regard faith as a form of perception, of enlightenment, and away from the popular notion that faith is an admission of ignorance—a matter of "believing where we cannot prove," as Tennyson put it. F r o m the conviction that spiritual knowledge is a form of insight—in fact, the highest form of insight—he moved on to the further conclusion that it is the whole man, and not merely a single faculty, that does the perceiving, so that religious faith becomes a kind of ecstatic vision in which one's whole being is caught up. T h i s mystical view of faith as a spiritual intuition, an immediate illumination, accords more with Augustine's credo ut intelligam

("I believe in

order that I may understand") than with any view contemporary with Edwards. 4 7 In the crisis of conversion two otherwise distinct kinds of knowledge merge into one, for every sense of the excellence of divine reality presupposes some "sensible knowledge of what is natural in religion." In fact, the latter is necessary "to prepare the m i n d for a sense of its spiritual excellency."

48

It may be said that "though a saving conviction

of the truth of the things of religion does most directly and immediately depend on a sense of their spiritual excellency, yet it also in some measure and most indirectly and remotely depends on an ideal apprehension of what is natural in religion and in a common conviction."

49

Augus-

128

A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

tine had said the same thing in a different way: " O u r understanding . . . contributes to the comprehension of that which it believes, and faith contributes to the belief of that which it comprehends."

50

Knowledge by signs, though to

Edwards a manifestation of human limitation and sin, may serve as the occasion for arousing the vivid sense of G o d . N o t to move beyond the artificial sign to the "actual idea," however, is to go on living, as the majority of mankind does, in an indirect, detached, and impersonal relationship with reality; it is to ignore the direct bearing which the knowledge situation has upon our own personal life and destiny. T h e perception of the actual idea is a living experience which involves the whole person in a direct and conscious participation in G o d . By the term "idea" Locke meant simply a mental picture—whether constructed from the data of memory or formed by the imagination—which may be a representation of reality but never reality itself. In Edwards' doctrine of the heart's "sense" the idea is identified with the reality it represents, and this is so because G o d is not only the most real of all realities but also the Reality with which, in every encounter with life, we are most directly and intimately confronted. A f t e r reading Locke, Edwards had concluded that our minds unaided are incapable of viewing anything immediately. T h e immediate object of the mind, as Locke had taught, is always the idea of the thing and not the thing itself. Yet, since G o d is by nature pure Idea, to k n o w H i m at all is to have an immediate perception. T h i s provides a clue to the Christian meaning of general revelation. T h e impossible becomes possible as the h u m a n heart is ushered into a living experience of immediate encounter with reality. T h e idea and the reality become one. T h e un-

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enlightened mind can know that there is a God through observation of "the images or shadows of divine things." But it can know God directly and personally only when it is caught up by God himself and transformed into a divine image. Only then do the various parts of the created world become media in and through which God is immediately apprehended. As the Apostle Paul has intimated, our apprehension of God is rooted in God's apprehension of us.61 Our knowledge of God is mediated in the sense that it comes to us along with our physical, social, and historical environment, but it is immediate in the higher sense that God is that Reality by which we are most directly confronted in our environment. That in us which is infinitely greater than ourselves responds to that in the world which is infinitely greater than the world. In Tennyson's words, "Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet." 62 A true knowledge of God is immediate, yet mediated. This paradox of "mediated immediacy" has been expressed in our day by a variety of thinkers including Martin Buber, Karl Heim, H. H. Farmer, and John Baillie. Their concern is to show that God does not stand over against man as though He were an object that could be observed at a theoretical distance; rather, God stands on both sides of the knowledge situation. For Edwards, as for Kierkegaard, God is always the Subject who can never be turned into a mere object. When Edwards argues that a true knowledge of God "is given immediately by God and not obtained by natural means," his intention is not to rule out means altogether. His point is that "it is given by God without making use of any means that operate by their own power. God makes use of means; but it is not as mediate causes to produce

A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

this effect. T h e r e are not truly any second causes of it; b u t it is produced by G o d immediately."

53

H e is at his best

when he relates the creature's living "sense" of G o d to God's self-movement toward the creature: The emanation or communication of the divine fulness, consisting in the knowledge of God, love to God, and joy in God, has relation indeed both to God and the creature; but it has relation to God as its fountain, as it is an emanation from God; and as the communication itself, or thing communicated, is something divine, something of God, something of his internal fulness, as the water in the stream is something of the fountain, and as the beams of the sun, are something of the sun. . . . Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God, and God is the beginning, middle, and end in this affair.1" H e r e is the mystic's sublime vision of God-as-He-is-in-thecreature responding to God-as-He-is-in-Himself. G o d is present and active on b o t h sides of the relationship. H e is to be sought and found not in some imagined distance between himself and the spirit of man, but in and through everything that touches our life. W e may find h i m not in the inaccessible mystery of the unknown but in the accessible mystery of the known. T h i s does not mean that rational reflection

is ruled out of court, as in irrational forms of mys-

ticism, b u t it is made secondary to a direct awareness of God. T h e theme is close to the heart of what Christianity means by the symbol of the divine presence. F a r m e r offers this personalistic description of the relationship: God speaks, acts towards man through the situations of nature and society; nevertheless when man hears God speaking he is

A "NEW

SENSE O F

THINGS"

»3»

conscious of standing in an immediate personal relationship to Him as active will and purpose. The relationship is immediate, and yet not unmediated. 55

Edwards' most significant sermon, by modern standards, carries the lengthy title A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to Be Both a Scriptural and a Rational Doctrine. It was preached at Northampton in the year 1733, and published in Boston a year later "at the desire of some of the hearers." 8 6 It contains his clearest statement of the specific religious content of the "sense of the heart" as the mystical consciousness of the immediate presence of God in the h u m a n heart. Coming, as it does, early in his career, it may be regarded as a serious reflection upon his own experience of a "new sense of things" which he records in his "Personal Narrative." In the sermon he first acknowledges that God is "the author of all knowledge and understanding whatsoever"— even of the "human arts and sciences, and skill in temporal affairs." 57 If his listeners were a bit stunned at the sermon's title, this opening statement probably set them at ease for the moment at least, for in this affirmation he is reiterating the basic idea in the Puritan "technologia." Doubtless he disturbed the self-contentment of his hearers as he went on to say that, whereas God conveys this knowledge of the laws of the arts and sciences "by the power and influence of natural means" only, "spiritual knowledge" is imparted to the soul "immediately." In using "means" God merely assists "the faculties of the soul to do that more fully which they do by nature." 58 T h e difference between the two kinds of knowledge lies, once again, in the qualitative, vital presence of God's spirit in the heart. God "acts upon the mind

132

A " N E W SENSE O F THINGS"

of an unregenerate person as an extrinsic, occasional agent," but "he unites himself with the mind of a saint, actuates and influences him as a new supernatural principle of life and action." T h e "natural man" exists in a hazy, remote, and impersonal relationship with God, and God acts upon him "as upon an external object." The "spiritual man" participates directly and consciously in God, exists in a vital, immediately personal, relationship with Him, and God acts in him "in a way of peculiar communication of himself; so that the subject is thence denominated spiritual." 69 This immediate knowledge is distinct from "inspiration" in that it suggests no new information in the way of truths or propositions to the mind, but yields a "due apprehension" of that which is already present to the mind. It is clear therefore that what Edwards means by "spiritual light" is not private revelation but illumination in the way of a new and higher appreciation of the beauty and value of the mind's real object. It is what he elsewhere calls "an idea of an idea," 60 viz., a qualitatively different perspective and valuation of a Reality already accessible to the mind. The "spiritual sense" then is an "immediate light" in the experience of which the spiritually enlightened envisage the superlative excellence of the divine Being. In one of the published "Miscellanies" he states the matter in this way: "Observe that the question with some is, whether the Spirit of God does anything at all in these days, since the Scriptures have been completed. With those that allow that he does anything, the question cannot be, whether his influence be immediate; for, if he does anything at all, his influence must be immediate." 61 T h e doctrine of the immediate divine light links Edwards' "sense of the heart" with his concept of God's selfcommunication. God's personal communication to the crea-

A " N E W SENSE O F

THINGS"

!33

ture is of the nature of a light immediately infused into the soul, and its ethical content is love. This "immediate light" is Christ the Logos, and this "holy love" is the active presence of God as Holy Spirit. "The essence of all true religion," he writes in the Treatise Concerning Religious Af fections, "lies in holy love; and . . . in this divine affection, and an habitual disposition to it, and that light which is the foundation of it, and those things which are the fruits of it, consists the whole of religion." 6 2 Thus, we see, the personal communication of an immediate divine light to the soul is the "foundation" of a truly religious experience. "There is, as it were, a light cast upon the ideas of spiritual things in the mind of the believer which makes them appear clear and real which before were but faint, obscure representations." 6 3 It enters the mind by a "kind of intuitive and immediate evidence." 8 4 The "spiritual sense" is without any long chain of arguments: "the argument is but one, and the evidence direct." It is an overpowering, all-conquering sense. He that truly sees the divine, transcendent, supreme glory of those things which are divine, does as it were know their divinity intuitively; he not only argues that they are divine, . . . he sees that in them wherein divinity chiefly consists; for in this glory, which is so vastly and inexpressibly distinguished from the glory of artificial things, and all other glory, does mainly consist the true notion of divinity: God is God, and distinguished . . . chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty. They therefore that see the stamp of this glory in divine things, they see divinity in them, they see God in them, and so see them to be divine. 65

conclusions Edwards draws is that the "sense of the heart" has a conditioning and purifying effect upon the cognitive powers of the mind. It tends to ONE O F T H E IMPORTANT

>34

A "NEW

SENSE O F

THINGS-'

"sanctify the reason," and causes it to lie open to the force of arguments for the truth of the Christian religion. Commenting on the contribution of enlightened reason to revelation in Edwards' thought, Richard Niebuhr has this to say: "Reason . . . —empirical, critical, and reflective reason —not only verifies revelation but adds to it a knowledge of the wonderful complexity and excellence of God's work in the creation . . . it is not only illuminated by revelation but illuminates i t . " 4 6 In Edwards' own words, the "sense of the heart" not only removes the hinderances of reason, but positively helps reason. It makes even the speculative notions the more lively. It engages the attention of the mind with the more fixedness and intensiveness to that kind of objects; which causes it to have a clearer view of them, and enables it more clearly to see their mutual relations, and occasions it to take more notice of them. The ideas themselves that otherwise are dim and obscure, are by this means impressed with the greater strength, and have a light cast upon them; so that the mind can better judge of them. As he that beholds the objects on the face of the earth, when the light of the sun is cast upon them, is under greater advantage to discern them in their true forms and mutual relations, than he that sees them in a dim starlight or twilight. 67

T h e "new sense" enables the mind to rise above the sensuous to the appreciation of spiritual beauty. But this knowledge cannot come by a mere act of will or reason. We must passively receive it, grace being the initiating presence and activity of God in the soul of man. T h e Calvinistic doctrines of divine election and limited atonement appear to weaken the full strength of Edwards' doctrine of immediate grace, but this need not preclude its wider application. This limitation points to the main difference between Edwards and the Cambridge Platonists with whom he

A " N E W SENSE OF T H I N G S "

135

shared many insights. T h e content of religious knowledge is similar for both. They differ concerning its availability. T h e experience which Edwards reserves for the elect is for the Christian Neoplatonist accessible to all men. 6 8 Even within Edwards' more restricted view, however, the mind in its aesthetic capacity does not remain passive with respect to its new "idea." Although we cannot create the presence of the idea in the mind, we can, through the power of enlightened reason, learn to grasp its meaning and significance in a larger context. H e sensed that Locke had overstressed the passivity of the mind in relation to its ideas, as well as the psychological character of the ideas. He saw that the "spiritual sense" involves an active participation of the total self. Its seat is accordingly in the "affections," that is, the personal, religious center of the self which Biblical writers call the "heart" and which some modern psychologists would call the "deep mind." There is, in fact, no part of a person that is not engaged in the activity we call spiritual perception. Instead of a gradual diminishing of the power of one's native capacities, as in Contemplative Mysticism, and a corresponding loss of individual consciousness, all the natural endowments enjoy an increase. T h e natural faculties are the subject of this light: and they are the subject in such a manner, that they are not merely passive, but active in it. . . . God, in letting in this light into the soul, deals with man according to his nature, or as a rational creature; and makes use of his human faculties. But yet this light is not the less immediately from God for that; though the faculties are made use of, it is as the subject and not as the cause. . . . As the use that wc make of our eyes in beholding various objects, when the sun arises, is not the cause of the light that discovers those objects to us. 69

136

A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

The main point Edwards seeks to prove in Freedom of the Will, is that volitions are determined by the mind's "preference" in a given situation, or, more correctly, by "a prevailing inclination of the soul." 7 0 " T h e will is always as the greatest apparent good is." 7 1 The point to observe in the context of the present discussion is that, in opposition to popular theological opinion today that an act of will on man's part initiates him into the spiritual life, Edwards takes the position that God initiates the life of the Spirit in man by communicating Himself to him in terms of an "immediate light" which man experiences as a "new simple idea" or "spiritual sense." This divine communication is not simply a means of grace, nor is its effectiveness dependent on any external "means," but is of the very essence of grace. A new propensity in the will toward spiritual good, as Mastricht had taught, accompanies the "spiritual sense" so that from then on the volitions are in harmony with the mind's view of the total situation, but it is clear that a man cannot will in harmony with an idea which is not yet present to his mind. Least of all can he create the presence of an idea like the intuition of spiritual beauty which is totally other than any idea he has ever entertained before. The godly man's idea of God consists very much of these spiritual ideas, that are complicated of those simple ones of which the natural man is destitute. But as soon as ever he comes to have the disposition of his mind changed, and to feel some of those operations of mind by means of which he gets those simple ideas, so that he sees the beauty of them, so he gets the sight of the excellency of holiness and of God. 7 2

T h e "new simple idea" is new in the sense that it is not derived from any past activities of the mind; simple in that

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it is not a synthesis of ordinary physical sensations; idea in the sense of an immediate consciousness, or intuition, of the reality and beauty of God and of godliness, accompanied by a profound emotion embracing the intuited object. T h e Holy Spirit is the personal embodiment of the "new simple idea," communicating himself to the soul so as to assimilate our nature into his divine nature. T h e work of grace in the heart consists therefore not merely in causing a volition, but in giving an "immediate light" to be apprehended. T h u s the whole problem of the will and freedom is posed in an entirely new context. Man wills what he loves, and he loves according as he perceives. This is the sense in which it is true that the man possessed of the "spiritual sense" transforms his own world of experience. In the total, religious response of the personality to the self-giving of God, a person transforms his own world of events by passionately grasping its transcendent meaning and significance. As another writer has put it: "We transform reality according to the way we see it, and we see reality according to the way we transform it." 73 There is an emotional element present in every rational act. Apart from this total participation in the mind of God the cognitive powers of the human mind are unable to grasp man's infinite reason for being. Man's attempt to understand, apart from spiritual illumination, the impenetrable depth of his being reveals his basic frustration and exposes his subconscious awareness of the presence of an unconditional dimension. There are as many different levels of knowledge as there are dimensions of reality. Philosophers have grouped them according to the physical, the aesthetic, and the religious. While the scientist, the artist, and the theologian are specialists, respectively, on these different levels, Edwards would

i38

A "NEW

SENSE O F

say that every man has within himself some

THINCS"

God-given

capacity for all three ways of looking at reality. Each is a legitimate and useful way of observing, yet each depends to some extent upon the other for full insight into the appreciation of the m e a n i n g of reality. O u r goal should be to strive to understand life in all its dimensions. N o modern writer has expressed this thought better than Sir Arthur Eddington as he contrasts the personal with the impersonal observation of a rainbow. A rainbow described in the symbolism of physics is a band of aethereal vibrations arranged in systematic order of wave-length from about .000040 cm. to .000072 cm. From one point of view we are paltering with the truth whenever we admire the gorgeous bow of colour, and should strive to reduce our minds to such a state that we receive the same impressions from the rainbow as from a table of wave-lengths. But although that is how the rainbow impresses itself on an impersonal spectroscope, we are not giving the whole truth and significance of experience—the starting-point of the problem—if we suppress the factors wherein we ourselves differ from a spectroscope. We cannot say that the rainbow, as part of the world, was meant to convey the vivid effects of colour; but we can perhaps say that the human mind as part of the world was meant to perceive it that way. Another scientist and philosopher of science, Alfred N o r t h Whitehead, has expressed the same thought with a different figure. What is wanted is an appreciation of the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment. When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness. 75

»39

A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

"Spiritual apprehension," as Edwards believed, is a new sensitivity to the beauty and value of the spiritually real. T h e total world of our experience opens before our minds a grand spectacle of divine glory. H e calls this apprehension " a holy taste to discern and relish divine beauties."

76

There

is an ideal union of cognition and emotion, for " i t causes the whole soul to accord and symphonize with it."

77

As he

described his own experience in the "Personal Narrative," the soul is " r a p t and swallowed up in God." T h e classicus

locus

on this aspect of the subject is contained in the

treatise on religious affections and is worth quoting here at length. He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fulness of all things, without which all the world is empty, no better than nothing, yea, worse than nothing. Unless this is seen, nothing is seen, that is worth the seeing: for there is no other true excellency or beauty. Unless this be understood, nothing is understood, that is worthy of the exercise of the noble faculty of understanding. This is the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the infinite Fountain of Good; without which God himself (if that were possible to be) would be an infinite evil: without which, we ourselves had better never have been; and without which there had better have been no being. He therefore in effect knows nothing, that knows not this: his knowledge is but the shadow of knowledge, or the form of knowledge. . . . For if what has been said be considered, it will manifest, that when a person has this sense and knowledge given him, he will view nothing as he did before. . . . He that sees not the beauty of holiness . . . is ignorant of the greatest works of God, the most important and glorious effect of His power upon the creature: . . . and in effect is ignorant of the whole spiritual world. 78 It is easy to see how Edwards could say that from the sense of spiritual beauty arises "as it were a new world of knowl-

140

A "NEW

SENSE O F

THINGS"

edge." 79 Apparently he had found, through "the sense of the heart," the "New World of Philosophy" he was seeking twenty-eight years earlier in the college notes. 80 participation in God's beauty is, the object of vision is not esoteric, but is attainable "by persons of mean capacities and advantages, as well as those that are of the greatest parts and learning." Persons with but an ordinary degree of knowledge "are capable, without a long and subtle train of reasoning, to see the divine excellency of the things of religion." 81 This perhaps explains in part why Edwards appealed at times to the deeper emotions of his people at Northampton, painting vivid pictures of Biblical images to prepare their hearts for the shock of "spiritual sensation." But the spiritual upheaval known historically as the Great Awakening was entirely unexpected. Edwards neither planned it nor sympathized with its excesses.82 T h e "Enthusiasts," he wrote, are merely "affected with their affections." 83 At the same time, however, he defended the revival against the generalization of unjust critics like Charles Chauncy, that it was nothing more than an orgy of emotionalism on a mass scale. 84 "I should think myself in the way of my duty," Edwards could say, "to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with." 85 His concern in the Awakening, as always, was to awaken the hearts of men to a spiritual apprehension of the supernal excellence of God. Chauncy, a rationalist, misunderstood Edwards on the "affections," assuming that he was defending religious passion at the expense of the intellect. Actually Edwards' conU N I Q U E AS T H I S S P I R I T U A L

A " N E W SENSE O F

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141

ception of the "religious affections" includes a critical intelligence. His quarrel with rationalists like Chauncy was that they wanted to reduce all religious experience to a merely intellectual enterprise. On the other hand, his quarrel with "enthusiasts," or emotional fanatics, such as James Davenport, was that they lacked the criteria for distinguishing "reasonable affections" from irrational emotions. " T h e emotion which emotes most emotionally" is never an intelligent criterion, especially not in a time of religious revival. John E. Smith, in his careful edition of the Religious Affections, has made unmistakably clear that Edwards' chief concern in the treatise was to broaden the accepted definition of human understanding so as to retain it as a vital, if critical, ingredient in all genuine religious experience.86 In one of the entries in the "Miscellanies" Edwards observes, like an acute psychologist, that persons respond differently to the presentation of the same Gospel. Whereas persons unaccustomed to systematic reasoning are more apt to be drawn to embrace its truth out of fear of the alternative consequences, thinking persons are apt to be convinced less by fear and more by rational deductions.87 However we come by it, it is the most important knowledge any man can have. This is the most excellent and divine wisdom that any creature is capable of. It is more excellent than any human learning; it is far more excellent than all the knowledge of the greatest philosophers and statesmen. . . . This knowledge has the most noble object that is or can be, viz., the divine glory or excellency of God and Christ. This light gives a view of those things that are immensely the most exquisitely beautiful, and capable of delighting the eye of the understanding. 88

Perhaps the revival first broke out in Northampton just because Edwards was so thoroughly convinced that his own

142

A "NEW SENSE OF THINGS"

vivid experience of a "new sense of things" was quite as accessible to the unlearned as it was to the intelligentsia. H e stated his doctrine of illumination in such a way that it was distinguishable from the subjectivism of the Antinomians and Quakers, at one extreme, and from the rationalism of the deists and Cambridge Platonists of his day, at the other extreme. H e steered a precarious middle course between unreasoned emotion and dispassionate reason. T h e religious "sense" is at once illumination

and

emotion.

" L i g h t " and "love" are the m a i n ingredients in God's selfcommunication to the creature; light is the cognitive element, love the aesthetic element. T h e act of the understanding is of the nature of a spiritual value judgment; the act of the will, or the willing act, is of the nature of an ethical response to the intrinsic value perceived, and concretely experienced as love. Understanding and volition are thus complementary facets of a truly religious experience. T r u e wisdom is love's apprehension of G o d , and of all else with reference to God. T h r o u g h the spiritual sense the mind is given a profound insight into the ultimate meaning of reality in all its proportions, harmonies, and relations. It assists persons to a right u n d e r s t a n d i n g of things

in general,

and

assists us to see the nature of them, and the truth of them, in their p r o p e r evidence. Whereas, the w a n t of this spiritual sense, a n d the prevalence of those dispositions that are contrary to it, tend to d a r k e n and distract the m i n d , a n d d r e a d f u l l y to d e l u d e a n d c o n f o u n d men's u n d e r s t a n d i n g . 8 9

EDWARDS INTRODUCED a m y s t i c a l e l e m e n t i n t o t h e f r a m e w o r k

of eighteenth-century Calvinism. 9 0 Even within Puritan theology some form of mysticism was always a theoretical possibility, although it was seldom made explicit. For this pur-

A " N E W SENSE O F

THINGS"

*43

pose we may define the mystic, broadly, as one who claims to know God through a form of spiritual inwardness. W . R. Inge provides us with a useful working definition of religious mysticism as "the attempt to realize, in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal'in the'temporal." 9 1 T h e existence of a mystical element in Puritanism is now being uncovered by scholars of Puritan thought in both England and America. G. F. Nuttall acknowledges that the phrase "Puritan mysticism might seem almost a contradiction in terms. Yet, in a piety which was essentially a movement towards immediacy in communion with God, it would be strange if mysticism were to find no place." 92 Perry Miller finds in the Puritan "moment of regeneration" the theological counterpart to the ecstasy of the mystic or the inspiration of the poet. 9 3 Visser't H o o f t recognizes what he calls a "subjective element" in historic Puritanism: "It is not based on the sentimental notion of the inherent value of the individual [as in pietism] but on his value in relation to eternal realities." 94 Nuttall finds this essentially mystical element in the Puritan doctrine of the Holy Spirit. 95 "There is not a little in puritan writers," he observes, "with the unmistakable marks of mysticism. Here, there is meant by it a sense of being carried out beyond the things of time and space into unity with the infinite and eternal, in which the soul is filled with a deep consciousness of love and peace, a unity so intimate as to make erotic terms the most natural on which to draw." 9 6 Winthrop Hudson, in an article called "Mystical Religion in the Puritan Commonwealth," 97 says that the early impetus for the mystical tendency in Puritanism is to be found in that element of the Puritan movement which em-

144

A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

phasized the immediacy of God as personally experienced by the believer. Lewis Bayly's Practice of Piety is one of the first full formulations of the new tendency. But the first real mystic was Francis Rous, who emerged out of orthodox Puritanism to become what Jerald C. Brauer has established as a "Puritan mystic." Rous's great work is The Mysticall Marriage (1635), a copy of which was in Cotton Mather's library. Other representatives of the resurgence of mysticism in seventeenth-century Puritanism include John Everard, Giles Randall, Peter Sterry, and Richard Sibbes. Rous represented a certain direction within Puritan thought which became dominant during the Commonwealth era and proved to be an influence in later Dutch pietism. It is still an open question whether the shift to Puritan mysticism is due largely to Continental influence or to a certain strain inherent in the very nature of Puritan thought. Brauer's main thesis is that Puritanism itself is the primary source of Puritan mysticism. This is similar to the thesis of Nuttall that mysticism was not a reaction to Puritanism but a certain type of development out of it. But Brauer suggests that it was partly in reaction to certain literalism and legalist tendencies in right-wing, or fanatical, Puritanism. T o the question about the source of Puritan mysticism . . . the answer might well be given that it was primarily the result of the readaptation of Puritan piety, polity, and theology to the continual frustrations of the attempted reformation of the English Church. It was an antidote to extreme legalism and offered a basis of comprehension transcending severely restricted boundaries. It first appeared after the fulminations of extreme literalists, and it flowered in the Commonwealth era when no one Church succeeded in bringing uniformity and peace. Springing from Puri-

A " N E W SENSE O F T H I N G S "

»45

tan ism itself, it drew strength from Bernard, Dionysius, the medieval German spiritualists, and the Family of Love.* 8

A century later Jonathan Edwards did for New England something similar to what Francis Rous did for seventeenthcentury English Puritanism. Edwards belongs with Rous to what Brauer has called the Puritan mystic type. The mysticism in Edwards was not a reaction to the purest Puritanism but represents the extension of one of the authentic strains in Puritan piety. The mystical union of the soul with God, which Edwards saw as a continuing event—not a fugitive rapture—in the life of the Christian, springs from God's giving of himself to man and man's response to God's gift. The resulting union is the living content of divine grace. "The more those divine communications increase in the creature," he writes, "the more it becomes one with God. The image is more and more perfect, and so the good that is in the creature comes forever nearer and nearer to an identity with that which is in God." 9 9 This is never an absolute identity, however. God is eternally the Creator, and man partakes of God's nature always "according to the capacity of a creature." 100 Edwards' mysticism reaches its height in his identification of Christian grace with the actual presence of God in the human heart. This is the main thrust of his treatise on grace. It is not, as commonly supposed, a mere effect of God's activity nor a consequence of some previous divine activity. It is not even a gift of God if by this is meant something other than God which He gives. Grace is literally the self-giving of God, the personal and active presence of God himself in the soul of man. "Grace in the heart is no

146

A " N E W SENSE O F T H I N G S "

other than the Spirit of God itself dwelling and acting in the heart of a saint." 1 0 1 T h e impersonal gap between the giver and the gift is closed, for here the divine Giver is himself the Gift. As he said in another place, "the communication itself, or thing communicated, is something divine, something of God, something of His internal fulness," so that "God is the beginning, middle, and end in this affair." 1 0 2 His favorite author, Mastricht, had drawn a useful distinction between Spiritum dantem ("Spirit-giving") and spiritum datum ("spirit-given"). 103 Although he was careful not to capitalize the second use of the term, the context strongly suggests a view of grace very similar to that of Edwards'. T h e distinction implies union, if not in some sense identity. T h e spirit of grace which is particular and partial in men of faith is universal and complete in God who is Grace-itself. It is the presence of the living Spirit of God that makes the human soul spiritually alive. T h e Holy Spirit, to Edwards, is God in person, and concretely conceived as agape, or transcendent love. This divine Love is the self-giving of God which vivifies and beautifies all things, especially created spirits, by effusing into them the principle of love. T h e same Spirit is present and active in unregenerate man as well, but only externally, imparting the force but not the nature of grace. 104 The Spirit of God may act upon the minds of men many ways, and communicate himself no more than when he acts upon an inanimate creature. For instance, he may excite thoughts in them, may assist their natural reason and understanding, or may assist other natural principles, and this without any union with the soul, but may act, as it were, as upon an external object. But as he acts in his holy influences and spiritual operations, he acts in a way of peculiar communication of himself; so that the subject is thence denominated spiritual. 105

A "NEW SENSE OF THINGS"

147

In the experience of Christian grace "the soul is spiritually sensible of God as being present with it, and as manifesting and communicating himself." 1 0 9 This interpretation of grace as the personal life of God in the soul marks a revolt against the mediating position of Roman Catholic theology as well as the prevailing tendency in Covenant Theology. Sacramental agencies and "means of grace" had been substituted for the "immediate light" and "personal love" of God in the human heart. "Grace is from God," says Edwards, "as immediately and directly as light is from the sun." Means of grace merely give "opportunity for grace to act. . . . Attending and using means of grace is no more than a waiting upon God for his grace." 107 Grace is a "vital union" between God and the soul, and everything else is made to depend on this union. "That which is reat in the union of Christ and his people is the foundation of what is legal." 108 Grace is God "uniting himself to the soul of a creature," so as to become "a principle of new nature," a "new spring of action." 109 It is an abiding quality only in so far as the Holy Spirit is actively present and livingly apprehended by the "sense of the heart." Grace is therefore of the nature of a new, continuous creation in the human soul, for all succeeding acts of grace must be as immediately, and, to all intents and purposes, as m u c h from the immediate acting of the Spirit of God on the soul, as the first; and if God should take away His Spirit out of the soul, all habits and acts of grace would of themselves cease as immediately as light ceases in a room when a candle is carried out. A n d n o m a n has habit of grace dwelling in him any otherwise than as he has the Holy Spirit dwelling in him, and acting in union with his faculties, after the m a n n e r of a vital p r i n c i p l e . 1 1 0

148

A " N E W SENSE OF T H I N G S "

Grace is not only the highest act of God's creativity, but the perception of its living content is the highest act of human apprehension. T h e "spiritual sense" is "the foundation of everything else that is distinguishing in true Christian experience." 1 1 1 Without it "all other principles of perception, and all our faculties are useless and vain." 1 1 2 "Unless this is seen, nothing is seen that is worth the seeing; for there is no other excellency or beauty." T h e unenlightened have no more notion of the transcendent "beauty of holiness" than "a man without the sense of hearing can conceive of the melody of a tune, or a man born blind can have a notion of the beauty of the rainbow." 1 1 3 " H e therefore in effect knows nothing, that knows not this." He that sees not the beauty of holiness "is in effect ignorant of the whole spiritual world." When Pascal wrote his famous sentence that "the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot comprehend," 1 1 4 he meant by the "reasons of the heart" something very similar to what Edwards means by "the sense of the heart." Through a "spiritual sense" the heart grasps passionately, yet intelligibly, the structure of meaning which reason—as purely theoretical reason—cannot comprehend. A "new world of knowledge" opens before the mind. T h e soul that apprehends the transcendent beauty of the divine Being as disseminated throughout the universe becomes a partaker of the beauty it apprehends, for "seeing the perfect idea of a thing, is, to all intents and purposes, the same as seeing the thing," and "by seeing a perfect idea, so far as we can see it, we have it." 1 1 5 T h e soul of the man is transformed "into an image of the same glory that is beheld." 1 1 6 T h e "new simple idea" enters the mind with the force of a personal •discovery. T h e heart awakens to the realization that it is

A " n e w sense o f

things"

149

one with God and that God is its life. Knowledge and love are livingly united in "the sense of the heart." "He that sees the glory of God," he said in a sermon on " T h e Pure in Heart," "in his measure beholds that of which there is no end. T h e understanding may extend itself as far as it will; it doth but take its flight into an endless expanse, and dive into a bottomless ocean. It may discover more and more of the beauty and loveliness of God, but it never will exhaust the fountain." 1 1 7

VII. CONCLUSIONS

If persons are religious only by fits and starts . . . [they] are like comets, they appear for a while with a mighty blaze; but are very unsteady and irregular in their motion (and are therefore called wandering stars, Jude 13), and their blaze soon disappears, and they appear but once in a great while. But the true saints are like the fixed stars, which, though they rise and set, and are often clouded, yet are steadfast in their orb, and may truly be said to shine with a c o n s t a n t light.

JONATHAN EDWARDS *

in which he steered a precarious middle course between equally dangerous extremes, grew in large part out of his own inner struggle with the forces of his time and place. Virtually isolated from the cultural crosscurrents of his day, his thought is perhaps more the product of his own direct experience than that of any other Christian thinker of his stature since Augustine. His own intellectual powers and the New World frontier combined to shape him into what the general editor of the latest edition of his works has called "the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene." 1 T h e whole course of his life of thought is thrown into sharp relief against the background of "the age of reason" —as Thomas Paine was later to call the eighteenth century —not, however, because he was an anti-intellectualist, but because he was concerned so seriously with the proper function of the intellect in the various processes of observation,

EDWARDS' PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY,

• Religious

Affections,

in Works,

I I , 373 (Yale ed.).

CONCLUSIONS

criticism, and reflection. It was characteristic of him to pursue every clue—empirical or conceptual—wherever it might lead him, and in this spirit of investigation and experimentation he was a true scientist. He proves to us that one can be a severe critic of radical empiricism and at the same time appreciate fully the importance of the empirical factor in all h u m a n understanding. O n e of the important lessons that exponents of the "New Reformation Theology" of this generation can learn from Edwards has to do with his profound trust in human reason as enlightened and disciplined by an inward "spiritual sense." There is in his writings none of the fear and distrust of "the philosophers," characteristic of Pascal, Calvin, or Barth. H e admits suspended judgment at difficult points, but he never makes an irrational appeal to authority. Perhaps this is why the reader discovers an unfinished quality about nearly everything he wrote, as though he intended to take u p the matter again as time permitted. One never feels that he has laid down his pen for the last time on any subject. Noah Porter described this side of Edwards neatly when he observed that Edwards never abandoned even for a moment the "confident belief that whatever is true in theology could be shown to be both true and reasonable in philosophy." 2 Edwards held a view of the revelational possibilities in the use of spiritually enlightened reason which can scarcely be compared with any orthodox theologian in the history of Christian thought. Critical intelligence operating under the force of spiritual light does not merely help a man to see God revealing Himself in the world; the enlightened mind itself may enrich and enhance the revelation to be perceived. He used philosophy for the purpose of semantic

«52

CONCLUSIONS

analysis, especially in analyzing the theological vocabulary of the church in early eighteenth-century New England. But more than this, a coherent theory of truth enabled him to see all facts and observations as consistent with the one truth that comes from God. Thus we may use the observations, experiments, and insights of science and philosophy and the arts to expand and enrich our understanding of universal truth. The one condition is that all such insights are to be viewed from within the theological circle of Christian faith. Alongside contemporaries like Samuel Johnson, Edwards too feared that the influx of the new thought from Europe would eventually "usher in a new divinity." Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, he saw that the solution to the problem lay not in the direction of challenging the new discoveries but instead in utilizing them to construct a new frame for Christianity's ancient picture of God-in-relationto-the-world. In this open spirit he faced up to the new science and philosophy more realistically than his contemporaries and sought to do for his time what each new generation of Christian thinkers must do for their time, that is, reformulate Christian doctrine in terms of contemporary modes of thought. This is what he had hoped to do on a grand scale in the projected work which he tentatively called in his private notebooks "A Rational Account of the Principles and Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion." In this potentially monumental work, which his short lifetime unfortunately did not permit him to write, he proposed "to show how all arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be as parts of it." 3 In this role Edwards appears as a bridge-builder or "mediating theolo-

CONCLUSIONS

*53

gian" between the theology and the intellectual culture of his day. As a corrective of the irrationalist attitude found today in some areas of existentialist thought, Edwards can help us restore confidence in the critical use of spiritually enlightened reason operating from the theological stance. At the same time, his broad concept of human understanding as including the total involvement of the whole person is a powerful antidote to the positivistic restriction of the use of the understanding to the limited functions of empirical observation, analysis, and classification. to be "the last High Priest of American Calvinism" 4 is only a half-truth. From another standpoint he was the first real Augustinian Calvinist in America. In retrospect, his reconstruction of Reformation theology was ill-timed, as might be illustrated by the enthusiastic reception given in the mid-twentieth century to another version of the Calvinism which in the nineteenth century was dubbed a "cultural anachronism." Perhaps it could be claimed that Edwards was two centuries ahead of his time, were it not for the fact that even he was not aware of the extent of the social and industrial change that was beginning to take place, and which was destined to challenge the best and expose the worst in any theology.5 It might be said of Edwards, exactly as Whitehead once remarked concerning Edwards' older contemporary George Berkeley, that "he made all the right criticisms, at least in principle. . . . But all the same, he failed to affect the mainstream of scientific thought. It flowed on as if he had never written." 6 At any rate, whether because we are only now catching up with Edwards' comprehensive understanding of the universe, or because the problems of life and destiny T H A T EDWARDS TURNED OUT

154

CONCLUSIONS

•with which he grappled are again pressing for solution, two centuries later some of us are only beginning to recognize the significance of what he was trying to say. Judging from the renewed interest in the "immaterialism" of Berkeley by British thinkers today, the same may be said of Edwards' kindred spirit. The reader will recall also that a full century passed before S0ren Kierkegaard, chief founder of existentialism, was thought to have written anything worth reading. Part of the reason Edwards did not appreciably affect the mainstream of eighteenth-century thought must be sought in the facts that his contemporaries misunderstood him and that his own disciples lacked his genius for maintaining the delicate distinctions and for balancing the logical poles necessary to his theology of the "third way." As a result the Edwardeans provoked antagonism toward Reformation theology, then identified with the "New England Theology," as the Edwards school came to be called. T h e saddest misfortune in all this is that the Edwardeans' distortion of Edwards' thought prevented most astute thinkers, from that day to this, from ever reading Edwards himself. Joseph Haroutunian, who has devoted a book to "The Passing of the New England Theology," makes the following critical judgment: Edwards gave New England Christianity a new and powerful impulse, which continued to be felt for almost a century. But the weakening of this impulse began immediately after he had done his work. His disciples and later champions lacked either his profound piety, or his intellectual vigor, or both. They reverted to governmental and legalistic conceptions of Calvinism, and under the influence of new political and humanitarian principles, modified Edwards' theology, subtly, variously, and greatly. This process culminated in the work of Nathaniel W. Taylor of Yale College,

CONCLUSIONS

*55

based upon a morality and philosophy profoundly other than those which motivated the theology of Edwards. 7

Although, fortunately, "New England Theology" was finally and permanently laid to rest, the central idea of the majesty of God, which Edwards the neo-Calvinist sought uncompromisingly to uphold, has found expression in each new generation since and never so forcefully as in the last three decades.8 He once remarked, " I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin," but went on to say that if he had to be labeled he was not unwilling to be called a Calvinist provided this did not mean he was required to accept everything Calvin taught as Calvin taught it. 9 As Edwards clearly saw, there is a quality of permanence about Calvinism which enables it to speak cogently to every age and generation. His reinterpretation of Reformation thought had, in Haroutunian's words, "a wisdom peculiar to its piety, which nevertheless is of permanent human appeal, because it typifies truths which belong to enduring structures of reality." »»

a Calvinist with a difference, and this difference is of decisive importance for theology today, particularly for the Christian understanding of God-in-relation-toman. His own reflection upon his profoundly mystical experience of God gave to eighteenth-century Calvinism a dynamic not usually associated with that school of thought. His concepts of the immediacy and the all-inclusiveness of the being of God, of both creation and revelation as ongoing processes, and of faith as the spiritual perception of divine beauty in the world, have the force to give the new Reformation theology now under construction a needed EDWARDS WAS

156

CONCLUSIONS

relevance to an age of thermonuclear physics, wave mechanics, and outer-space exploration. Today an understanding of God is required which will do justice to his greatness in terms of the staggering dimensions of interplanetary space, but which will at the same time provide us with renewed assurance that we will not lose touch with God in the sheer vastness of our expanding universe. There is a danger, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer's voice from a German prison has warned us, 11 that if our idea of God is too narrow and circumscribed we will tend to use his name as a mere euphemism for the incompleteness of our knowledge of the universe. As the frontiers of our knowledge are pushed back farther and farther and our mental horizons are stretched to the point of bewilderment, there is the subtle danger that, in some deistic fashion, we may tend to push the "God" we conceive farther and farther out into the dark regions of interplanetary space and to the remote edge of the now finite universe, until the "wholly Other" becomes also the "wholly Absent." It is therefore of the highest importance that we recover for modern man the real possibility of an immediate and vital experience of God as confronting us directly in our own familiar "world of experience," and not merely in the great unknown beyond our grasp where most theoretical theists seem to have left him. There is much we can learn from Edwards' strong appeal to immediate experience as we attempt to meet the challenge of our time. We are not to look for God in the mystery of the unknown so much as in the mystery of the known, not at the inaccessible borders of our life but at its very center. It is not in any alleged distance between the divine and human spirit that we are likely to confront

CONCLUSIONS

1

57

God, b u t in and through the familiar and otherwise commonplace. Edwards gave philosophic expression to the sound Reformation principle that God is truly known only through firsthand, immediate experience. It was, in fact, the intention of Jesus that his disciples should enter into the same kind of intimate and personal relationship with God which he, as the Christ of God, experienced without limitation. But most of us who claim to be his disciples are afraid to experiment too far in this direction lest we be labeled as "mystics" or "radicals." Edwards the "experimental theologian" was immune to this phobia. He saw that our knowledge of the Reality which concerns us all most ultimately is mediated in the sense that it comes to us in and together with our world of experience, but he also saw that it is immediate in the higher sense that God is that Reality which, of all realities, confronts us most directly in the world and which continually invades all areas of our common life. Rational reflection is not ruled out in this kind of direct experience, but it is made to serve a prior immediate awareness of the living Source of everything that has life. T h e new world-picture before our eyes demands that we proclaim a living God who is more than a mere symbol for what science cannot yet explain. I n an era of nuclear power and space penetration man is grasping more desperately than ever for contact with an ultimate Reality that is near and at the same time holds the explanation for everything, for unless we can believe in such a God, logically we can no longer believe in anything at all. Edwards' God is not hidden in the inaccessibility of the unknown; he is creatively present and directly communicative in the world we already know. Paradoxically, God is transcendently imma-

i58

CONCLUSIONS

nent. A keen student of modern physics writes wisely when he says: "So long . . . as we can conceive the world of God only as the upper story of the cosmic space, so long will God's activity, too, always be a force which effects earthly events only from above." 12 The new picture of the universe may call for some modification of our traditional understanding of God. We may need to stretch our theological horizons to fit an expanding universe. It is not unchristian to think so. Theology had to reframe its picture of the world and God following the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century, and again in the eighteenth century after the Newtonian triumph. of thought there have always been a few men of vision for whom God was not limited to anybody's conception of Him or to any particular cosmogony. One of these was the writer of the Psalm 139, who held a dynamic conception of God which is still meaningful in a scientific age: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" And he finds the answer in the realization that if we could penetrate the remotest regions of outer space in any direction, in this universe or a million like it, the essential truth would remain unchanged: "Even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me." We may be more advanced in scientific information about the universe we live in, but if we would learn about God we may still need to sit at the feet of the Hebrew Psalmist. Jesus too was far in advance of the popular understanding of his time when he said to the Samaritan woman, " T h e hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father . . . when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and IN T H E HISTORY

CONCLUSIONS

»59

truth." 13 T h e people of the Old and New Testament lived in a small world because their explorations were limited. Yet they knew something which none of us understands well enough, namely, that human thought can in no way limit the living God who is ever-present and present everywhere, who at once fills and encompasses the universe he has made. It is to this grand understanding of the God of Hebrew-Christian faith that Edwards' whole intellectual effort bears witness. " T o treat God as God" 14 was his overarching concern. It is true that he drank at the fountain of Lockean psychology and Newtonian physics, and these helped him outgrow the medieval picture of the physical universe. What is more important is that his reason for doing so was not that he might overthrow the Augustinian ontology at the base of original Puritanism, but instead that he might recast the Reformation theology in an intellectual framework compatible with new understanding of the structure of the world and the ways of the mind. His purpose was not to reformulate eighteenth-century ideas in terms of Christian thought but to restate Christian thought in terms of eighteenth-century ideas. And this difference is of first importance. In an age when vital religion was at a low ebb, he was engaged with his whole being in that enterprise which has been described as "the Puritan's effort to confront, face to face, the image of a blinding divinity in the physical universe." 1 5 Doubtless Jonathan Edwards' chief fault lay in trying to express, without a poet's imagination, ideas so profound that they can be expressed adequately only in the language of poetry. Yet nobody was ever more cognizant of the agony in this conflict. Although not a poet he was nevertheless, in

i6o

CONCLUSIONS

Perry Miller's judgment, "one of America's five or six major artists, who happened to work with ideas instead of with poems or novels." 16 Although he wrote in the idiom of his time and place, Edwards was ahead of his century in grasping the theological implications of modern science and philosophy. Much of what he understood about the vastness and complexity of the universe has been dramatized for us in this generation by atomic bombs, man-made earth satellites, and moon rockets. W e are now living in an era when it is literally true that every point in space is here, and every moment of time is now, when, in the lines of Elizabeth Browning, Earth's crammed with heaven, A n d every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, T h e rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, . . . unaware. . . . 1 7

APPENDIX. SOME PERMANENT CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT AWAKENING IN A L E T T E R to a Boston clergyman, dated December 12, 1743, Edwards comments on the favorable results of the Awakening in Northampton, approximately ten years after the first signs of revival: "Notwithstanding all the corrupt mixtures that have been in the late work here, there are not only many blessed fruits of it, in particular persons that yet remain, but some good effects of it upon the town in general. A spirit of party has more extensively subsided. I suppose there has been less appearance, these three or four years past, of that division of the town into two parties, which has long been our bane, than has been, at any time during the preceding thirty years; and the people have apparently had much more caution, and a great guard on their spirit and their tongues, to avoid contention and unchristian heats, in town-meetings, and on other occasions. And 'tis a thing greatly to be rejoiced in, that the people very lately came to an agreement and final issue, with respect to their grand controversy relating to their common lands; which has been, above any other particular thing, a source of mutual prejudices, jealousies and debates, for fifteen or sixteen years past. T h e people also seem to be much more sensible of the danger of resting in old experiences, or what they were subjects of at their supposed first conversion; and to be more fully convinced of the necessity of forgetting the things that are behind, and pressing forward and maintaining earnest labour, watchfulness and prayerfulness, as long as they live." (Quoted in Edwards, Works, I, 165-68, Dwight ed.)

One historian of the Great Awakening offers the following estimate of its permanent effects: "Nineteenth century missions, the glory of the church, had their roots in the new missionary impulse which, like so many other movements, resulted from the Great Awakening. . . . Humanitarian enterprises of many kinds, besides missionary endeavor, owe their inception to the new social

162

APPENDIX

consciousness that came with the Great Awakening. Sympathies were profoundly stirred. T h e people were awakened to a new interest in the orphan, the negro, the Indian, and the unfortunate whether at their doors or in the most distant provinces. T h e first word against slavery was spoken by men straight from the home of Pietism in Germany. T h e anti-slavery movement in New England was originated by Hopkins [a pupil of Edwards]. . . . The mission to the African in America grew out of the Great Awakening and measurably prepared the negro for the enjoyment of liberty." (C. H. Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, p. 148.)

NOTES Complete titles and publication information of works cited may be found in the Bibliography, if not contained in notes. I . I N T R O D U C T I O N : EDWARDS A N D T H E T H I R D

WAY

1. Parrington, American Thought, I, 159. 2. Stewart, Literature and Doctrine, p. 34. 3. Joseph Haroutunian, in a review of Jonathan Edwards, by Perry Miller, in Theology Today, VII, 554-56. 4. Schneider, Puritan Mind, p. 105. 5. "Miscellanies," No. 116, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 110. Of the six hundred full-length manuscript sermons extant, about 25 percent are tentatively classified as evangelistic and only a few of these are of the threatening, imprecatory sort. A much larger percentage is typed as theological or as dealing with the Christian experience and with personal and social ethics. Of the seventy or so sermons already published, only about eight are denunciatory. 6. Richard Niebuhr, in Niebuhr and Beach, eds., Christian Ethics, p. 380. 7. History of the Work of Redemption, in Works, I, 466 (New York ed.). 8. Parrington, American Thought, I, 150. 9. Stewart, Literature and Doctrine, p. 8. 10. Parkes, "New England in the 1730's," New England Quarterly, III (1930), 116. 11. Winslow, Edwards, p. 326. Miss Winslow's book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is the most dependable factual biography of Edwards. 12. Miller, Edwards, p. xii. This book is, without doubt, the only study yet that has done justice to the greatness of Edwards as a thinker. 13. Ferm, Puritan Sage, p. xiv.

164

NOTES:

EDWARDS AND T H E

THIRD

WAY

14. Horton, Realistic Theology, p. 14. 15. This appeared as a news item in Presbyterian Life shortly after the launching of Russia's first earth satellite. 16. J. B. Phillips, Your God Is Too Small, (New York, Macmillan, 1955), p. v. 17. Ibid., p. vi. 18. Heim, Spirit and Truth, p. 17. 19. It is expected that all the "Miscellanies" will be published in the forthcoming Yale edition of Edwards' works. Five volumes of the "Miscellanies" are projected, the first of which is scheduled to appear in 1960. T h e entire manuscript contains 1,360 separate entries jotted down in the heat of the moment, in much the same way as Pascal wrote his Pensées. Begun during his undergraduate days at Yale, they were continued throughout the remainder of his life as his intellectual diary. II. MAJESTY AND IMMEDIACY IN THE BEING O F GOD

1. Works, I, 665 (Dwight ed.). 2. "Of Being," in Works, I, 707 (Dwight ed.). 3. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 708 (Dwight ed.). 4. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 676 (Dwight ed.). See also text below, p. 40. 5. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 182 (Yale ed.). 6. Ibid. Edwards does not distinguish "essence" from "existence," although he does distinguish finite existence from infinite existence, and the "essence" of God from his "fulness." In the early "Notes" and in the later treatises he equates Being-itself with "Real Existence." God comprehends and includes all existence in his own "internal fulness," and all creation is an "emanation" of God. All permanent reality is either God-in-himself or God-for-us, or, as in Whitehead's language, "God Primordial" and "God Consequent." 7. Ibid. Edwards' argument here is somewhat reminiscent of Samuel Clarke, a student of Leibniz and a moderate deist, in Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1706), pp. 22-26. Clarke argues for a Being who "exists by an absolute necessity originally in the nature of the thing itself." T h e internal necessity of this Being "must antecedently force itself upon us, whether we will or not even when we are endeavoring to suppose that no such being exists," for "a necessity . . .

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absolutely in its own nature, is nothing else but its being a plain impossibility, or implying a contradiction, to suppose the contrary. T h e idea of such a Being "we cannot possibly extirpate or remove from our minds. . . ." There is no evidence that Edwards had at this point read Clarke, although eight editions of this work had been published in England by 1717, a year after Edwards entered college. Undoubtedly the argument was at least in the air at Yale, Clarke being, in the opinion of some, the foremost English philosopher of the first three decades of the eighteenth century. In his treatise on freedom of the will (1754) Edwards quotes Clarke to substantiate his view of "necessity." See Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 377 ff. (Yale ed.). 8. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 182 (Yale ed.). 9. "Of Being," in Works, I, 707 (Dwight ed.). 10. "Miscellanies," No. 27a, quoted in E. C. Smyth, "Jonathan Edwards' 'Idealism,' " American Journal of Theology, I (1897), 952 ff. 11. Calvin, Institutes, I, xiv, 1. 12. See David Hume, Dialogues on Natural Religion; also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Kant argues that the categories of thought we employ in our knowledge of the observable world are incompetent to deal with the transcendent realities. When we attempt to do this our minds are led into a labyrinth of insoluble antinomies. It becomes possible to argue for or against the existence of God without convincing power. 13. Edwards' unique conception of divine self-communication, which may be his most original contribution to philosophical theology, is treated fully in Chapter Five of this book. 14. "Of Being," in Works, I, 707 (Dwight ed.). 15. Bliss Carman, "Lord of the Far Horizons," in Bliss Carman Poems (New York, Dodd, Mead). 16. Alfred Tennyson, " T h e Higher Pantheism," in J . D. Morrison, ed., Masterpieces of Religious Verse (New York, Harper, 1948), p. 11. 17. Sermon based on Luke xxiv. 32, preached at Northampton June, 1736, in Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). 18. "Miscellanies," No. aa, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, pp. 244 f. 19. J . H. Randall and Justus Buchler, Philosophy: An Introduction (New York, Barnes and Noble, 1942), pp. 177 f.

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20. Hartshorne, "Introduction," in Hamhorne and Reese, eds., Philosophers Speak of God, p. 19. For further discussion of the need for a "third way" in theology, see also Hartshorne, Divine Relativity, especially Chapter II; Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 6, et passim; Duthie, God in His World, pp. 50-53. 21. "Miscellanies," No. 697, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 262. 22. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 220 (New York ed.). 23. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Immanent God," in J. D. Morrison, ed.. Masterpieces of Religious Verse (Harper, 1948), p. 31. 24. Norman Kemp Smith, "Is Divine Existence Credible?," Proceedings of the British Academy, XVII (1931), 22. 25. Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, IV, x. 26. This knowledge of God by immediate awareness is developed fully in Chapter Six of this book. For Edwards on the subject, see Religious Affections, in Works, II, 205-17, 298 f. (Yale ed.); and "Miscellanies," No. aa, in Townsend, ed., Philosophy of Edwards, pp. 244 ff.; see also Divine and Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 438-50 (New York ed.); cf. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 182 (Yale ed.). 27. Paul Tillich, "The Religious Situation in Germany Today," Religion in Life, III (1934), 167. 28. "Of Being," in Works, I, 707 (Dwight ed.). 29. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 716 (Dwight ed.). 30. Although Edwards has been called an idealist as well as an empiricist, and although he did hold an idealistic conception of matter and stressed the importance of the empirical factor in the knowing process, it is probably more accurate to associate him historically with classical realism as it prevailed in the late Middle Ages in the thought of Nicholas Cusanus and others. This same line of thought was predominant in the early Christian centuries as Augustinian Neoplatonism. Emphasizing as it does the participation of the individual in the universal, and of the knower in the known, this strand of Christian thought is variously styled "dialectical realism," "mystical realism," and "ontological realism" to distinguish it from the theory of knowledge known as "critical realism." Tillich has pointed out that the "realism" of the Middle Ages meant almost exactly what we call "idealism" today, while the "realism" current in our day is almost the same as the "nominalism" of the Middle Ages (Systematic Theology I, 178).

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167

31. See, for example, Stephens, "Jonathan Edwards," in Hours in a Library, Vol. I. See also Allen, Life and Writings of Edwards, passim. 32. "Miscellanies," No. 27a, quoted in E. C. Smyth, "Jonathan Edwards' 'Idealism,' " American Journal of Theology, I (1897), 952 ff. 33. Malebranche, Search After Truth, IV, xi, 165. 34. "Miscellanies," No. 880, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 87. 35. Ibid., No. 697, p. 262. 36. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 220 (New York ed.); hypens added. 37. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 696 (Dwight ed.). 38. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 221 (New York ed.). 39. True Virtue, in Works, II, 301 (New York ed.). Hyphens added. 40. Ibid., p. 266. 41. Ibid., p. 267. 42. Lovejoy, Chain of Being, pp. 43 ff. 43. See text below, pp. 48, 55. 44. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 235. See also Tillich, Biblical Religion, p. 82. 45. Tillich points out that those who look for God as a mere being among other beings will not find him because they are looking in the wrong place: "If God were what these critics and defenders declare him to be—a being alongside others, then it should be possible to find such a being in the context of reality either by direct sense impressions or at least by indirect conclusions from sense impressions as is done with all other objects which exist. But this method never succeeded. God never has been found; and those naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who boasted of this fact of not finding him were right. But they were looking in the wrong place!" ("The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge," The Crane Review, Spring, 1959). 46. "Miscellanies," No. 1234, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection), transcribed by Thomas A. Schafer. T h e exact quote, according to Karl Heim, is: "God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere" (Heim, Faith and Science, p. 247). Blaise Pascal applies the statement—which Heim attributes to Nicholas Cusanus—not to God but to nature: "Nature . . . is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere" (Pensées, ii [New York, Dutton, 1932]

i68

n o t e s : m a j e s t y and immediacy in c o d

p. 72). There is a passage in Plotinus which may have inspired Cusanus: "it is true that the divinity is nowhere, and false that He is anywhere. . . . If then He, being nowhere, be not distant from anything, then He will in himself be everywhere" (Plotinus, Complete Works, trans, by K. S. Guthrie, II [London, George Bell, 1918] 590. The origin of the quotation is not important except in so far as Edwards felt it was worth incorporating into his "Miscellanies." The secondary source he was using was Philip Skelton, Deism Revealed (2 vols., 2nd ed., London, 1751), II, 110 f. 47. It should not be forgotten that much in Puritan thought was compatible with Platonism, including the conviction of a supernatural world above and behind the phenomenal world. In his exposition of the Puritan "technologia" Perry Miller has shown that William Ames and Alexander Richardson, in their theory of a preexistent platform of ideas, expounded for Puritan thought a philosophy that was nothing short of sheer Platonism (New England Mind, p. 177). "Technologia" was a complex theory of epistemology and metaphysics developed through the use of Peter Ramus' "Platonic" logic. The rules of the arts are the ideas of God, fixed and immutable in a world of deceptive shadows. Therefore the knowledge of the arts is the pathway to a knowledge of God. Herbert W. Schneider has characterized this "Puritan Platonism" as "dialectical pietism, or . . . the application of dichotomical method to the technology of the covenant of grace" (review of Miller's New England Mind, in Journal of the History of Ideas, I [January, 1940], 120). Ramus considered Plato "the Homer of philosophers," and was a critic of the Aristotelian categories. T o him, logic was more of a useful art than it was a science of proof. He became known as the "French Plato." Many seventeenth-century Puritans incorporated the Cambridge Platonists' adaptation of Ramus, and accordingly Ramus had a considerable indirect infiuence in New England. But the whole structure, according to Miller, crumbled under the force of Locke and Newton. (See Peter Ramus, The Art of Logick, and the recent important study of Ramus by W. J. Ong, Ramus: Method of Dialogue from Discourse to Reason). 48. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 50. 49. In the Middle Ages a long and vigorous debate was carried on between the Scotists and the Thomists on the priority of will or intellect in God. Is the will of God arbitrary or is it

n o t e s : m a j e s t y a n d i m m e d i a c y i n god

169

moved by something in his character? T h e Scotists, following Duns Scotus (1266-1308), asserted the primacy of will in God. T h e Thomists, following Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), insisted that God's will is determined by His divine character. It is generally believed that Calvin was influenced more by Scotus than by Thomas on this subject and that this may account—along with the fact that he was trained in law—for his great stress upon divine decree and government. See especially Calvin's essay on " T h e Eternal Predestination of God," in Calvin's Calvinism, Part I, trans, by Henry Cole. 50. See Edwards' argument in God's End in Creation, in Works, Vol. II (New York ed.). 51. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 708 (Dwight ed.). Considerable debate has been waged concerning the possible sources of Edwards' early reflections on idealism. It has been rather firmly established that there was no trace of Berkeley's writings in New England prior to 1719. Although the Theory of Vision was published in 1709, and the Principles by 1710, neither was in the Yale College library during Edwards' undergraduate days, when he is believed to have written his now famous "Notes on the Mind" and "Notes on Science." Sereno E. Dwight, Edwards' first biographer, assigns to these notes an early date, observing in the manuscripts a discernible change in handwriting from round and legible to angular and less distinct. H e dates them between 1718 and 1720. (See Works, I, 84, 41, 53 f., Dwight ed.) Egbert C. Smyth, in a later study of the manuscripts, substantiates Dwight's opinion of their early date ("Some Early Writings of Jonathan Edwards," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, X [new series], p. 233). In Edwards' "Catalogue of Books" (Yale Collection of Edwards Manuscripts), he enters Berkeley's Alciphron, Principles, and Theory of Vision, as late as 1730. Edwards' college years were 1716-20. Still another study of the manuscripts was made by F. B. Dexter, which further corroborated the findings of Dwight and Smyth. (See F. B. Dexter, " T h e Manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Series II, XV, 15.) Furthermore, there is no evidence that the Rector of Yale, Timothy Cutler, or tutors Elisha Williams and Samuel Johnson knew of the existence of Berkeley's writings prior to 1719. Although Edwards had a brief contact with Johnson at Yale, Johnson himself, according to his autobiography, was not influenced by the philosophy of Berkeley

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before 1723. (See E. C. Smyth, "The 'New Philosophy' Against which Students at Yale College Were Warned in 1714," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, XI [Oct., 1896], 251-52.) T h e influence of Malebranche upon Berkeley is well known. Georges Lyon (in L'Idéalisme en Angleterre au XVIII' Siècle, pp. 422 S.), suggests the possibility that Edwards may have had some knowledge of Malebranche through his English interpreters. Malebranche's Recherche de la Vérité was published in English in 1694, and Edwards' "Catalogue" indicates that he read it, while John Norris' interpretation of Malebranche, in Theory 0/ the Ideal or Intelligible World, was published by 1701, in England, and was available in the Yale library while Edwards was a student. Every study of sources, however, has led to the conclusion that Edwards was not dependent on any one author or school of thought, and that his originality stands out in every comparison. Perhaps the soundest judgment on this matter is expressed by H. W. Schneider when he concludes that further discussion of the sources of Edwards' thought now seems superfluous (History of American Philosophy, p. 31). 52. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 724 (Dwight ed.). Concerning recent views of "matter," A. A. Luce, foremost interpreter of Berkeley's philosophy, comments as follows: "Matter is becoming more of an adverb and less of a noun; it is rather a way of thinking than a thing thought. T h e word has its uses, and it may survive awhile as a collective term for objects of sense or for some of their general features; in the religious context it may help to safeguard reverence; in philosophy it comes in handy as a description for possible objects of sense when we require to distinguish them from those actually being sensed; but matter as material substance, matter as an object of speculative faith, matter as the 'other' of the sensible world and making two with it, matter as the hidden hand, as the vera causa of sensation and of change, such matter has no future; it is the deservedly ridiculed 'something we know not what.' T h e euthanasia of material substance cannot be long delayed; it will die of neglect and disuse, rather than of formal refutation; for when perceptual analysis has clarified the perceptual situation, and disclosed its two factors, the subject and the object, when the percipient object is taken at its face value, then material substance just fades out, its

NOTES: BEYOND THEISM

occupation gone. Matter puzzles and perplexes us, and explains nothing; nothing in rerum nature corresponds to the term; no branch of study would be embarrassed by its passing; thought is quicker and action is surer without it; a man thinks better, works better, prays better, if he drops it altogether." {Berkeley's Immaterialism, pp. 157 f.) Edwards early recognized the inadequacy of the term: "Instead of matter being the only proper substance, and more substantial than anything else, because it is hard and solid; yet, it is truly nothing at all, strictly and in itself considered" ("Notes on Science," in Works, I, 726 [Dwight ed.]). Again, "the reason why it is so exceedingly natural to men, to suppose that there is some Latent Substance, or Something that is altogether hid, that upholds the properties of bodies, is, because all see at first sight, that the properties of bodies are such as require some Cause, that shall every moment have influence to their continuance, as well as a Cause of their first existence. All therefore agree, that there is Something that is there, and upholds these properties. And it is most true, there undoubtedly is; but men are wont to content themselves in saying merely, that it is Something; but that Something is He, by whom all things consist" ("Notes on the Mind," in Works I, 676 [Dwight ed.]). 53. Edwards Manuscripts, Folder XI, Yale Collection. III. BEYOND THEISM

1. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 221 (New York ed.). 2. Richard B. Fuller, No More Secondhand God, cited in Dictionary of Quotations (H. L. Mencken, ed.), under "God." 3. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 722 (Dwight ed.). 4. Ibid., p. 731. 5. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 392 (Yale ed.). 6. Ibid. 7. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 724 (Dwight ed.). T h e observations in the "Notes on Science" evince a spirit of critical analysis, a feeling for classification, and a desire to probe beneath observable phenomena. Some of the hypotheses are remarkably in tune with modern theories. He believed, for example, that the universe, or "Starry World," is a spheroid, and that this could be proved from observation of the Milky Way. His explanations of the cold of winter and the heat of summer, and of

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the phenomena of lightning and thunder agree substantially with modern theories. He anticipates Franklin's theory of the identity of lightning with electricity. He adopts Newton's corpuscular theory of light, and he knew that light travels faster than sound, yet at a calculable speed. Moreover, he knew that sound is a vibration in the air, and that heat is a violent agitation of particles in the air. (For a detailed discussion, see Rufus Suter, "An American Pascal: Jonathan Edwards," Scientific Monthly, May, 1949.) 8. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 724 (Dwight ed.). 9. See Augustine, City of God, xii, 25, in Works, Vol. II. 10. See ibid., xi, 10: see also Confessions, xii, 7, in Works, Vol. I. 11. "Miscellanies," No. 1263, quoted in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 185. 12. Original Sin, in Works, II, 488 (New York ed.). 13. Ibid., p. 489 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Cited in Miller, New England Mind, p. 234. 17. John Scotus Erigena, De Divisione Naturae (Oxford, 1681), III, xix. Erigena was the first to modify the Church's doctrine of creation out of nothing. This work was condemned to be burned by Pope Honorius III in 1225. The "nothing" out of which the world was created, says Erigena, is God's own incomprehensible essence: "ineffabilem et incomprehensibilem divinae naturae inaccessibilemque claritatem omnibus intellectibus sive human is sive angelicis incognitam (superessentialis est enim et supernaturalis) eo nomine (nihil) significatam crediderim," ibid., quoted in Friederich Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, I, 362). 18. Miller, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity," in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Series II, Vol. XV (19012), p. 254. 19. Chubb, Collection of Tracts, p. 210. 20. Original Sin, in Works, II, 488 (New York ed.). 21. "Miscellanies," No. 125, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 76. 22. Ibid. 23. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 713 (Dwight ed.). 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. Ci. Augustine, who in one of his commentaries says, "God is not diffused through all things as a quality of the world but as the creative substance of the world which He governs and

NOTES: BEYOND THEISM

'73

maintains. . . ." (Epistolae CLXXXV1I, iv, 14-vi, 20; quoted in Erich Przywara, éd., An Augustine Synthesis [London, Sheed and Ward, 1945], p. 109). 26. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 713 (Dwight ed.). 27. See Isaac Newton, Opticks. 28. Discussed in Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, II, 90. 29. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 706 (Dwight ed.). 30. Heim, Faith and Science, pp. 170-72. 31. Ibid., p. 108. 32. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 727 (Dwight ed.). 33. Ibid., p. 724. 34. Original Sin, in Works, II, 490 (New York ed.). 35. Ibid. 36. On Cudworth, see John Tulloch, Theology and Philosophy in England, I, 88, 270. 37. A Divine and Supernatural Light (sermon), in Works, IV, 447 (New York ed.). 38. "Miscellanies," No. 1263, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 185. 39. Cf. Otto Piper, God in History (New York, Macmillan, 1939), also Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York, Scribners, 1936). 40. This work was undoubtedly inspired, in part, by his favorite author, Petrus van Mastricht, who takes a similar approach to history in his Theoretico-practica Theologia. See especially the chapter on "Historia Ecclesiastica." 41. All he had time to develop was a series of sermons preached at Northampton. This series was published in Edinburgh, in 1774, after Edwards' death, by a close friend and correspondent, the Rev. John Erskine of Greyfriars Kirk. 42. From a letter printed in Works, I, 569 ff. (Dwight ed.). 43. A History of the Work of Redemption, in Works, I, 512 (New York ed.). 44. Ibid., p. 511. 45. Ibid., p. 512. 46. Ibid., p. 508. 47. Ibid., p. 510. 48. Ibid., p. 388. 49. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 713 (Dwight ed.). 50. Ibid., pp. 723. 51. Many saw in Newton's "System of the World" atheistic implications (as do some today in Einstein's theory of "relativity"), but not so Edwards. It was native to him to suppose the world a completely coherent system with its center of reference in the

*74

NOTES: BEYOND THEISM

mind of God. In his study of Newtonian physics he found confirmation of this religious conviction. 52. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 713 (Dwight ed.). 53. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 669 (Dwight ed.). 54. Original Sin, in Works, II, 488 (New York ed.). See J o h n Taylor, Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (London, 1760). 55. Original Sin, in Works, II, 489 (New York ed.). 56. "Miscellanies," No. 178, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 259. 57. Ramsperger, Philosophies of Science, p. 24. 58. McGiffert, Sr., Protestant Thought before Kant, p. 37. 59. "Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist." Franklin, Autobiography (London, Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 776-77. 60. T h e only "Miscellanies" published in the eighteenth century were two companion volumes published in Edinburgh as Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects (1793) and Remarks on Important Theological Controversies 1796). These are the only "Miscellanies" included in any of the collected works. It was not until 1890 that other "Miscellanies" were published, and this time only excerpts were printed by E. C. Smyth as part of a book review (Andover Review, X I I I [1890], 285-304). T h e first real attempt to print the journal was made as recently as 1955, by H. G. Townsend. T h e full text will be included in the new Yale edition of Edwards' works. 61. "Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Edwards (A. B. Grosart, ed.), p. 40. 62. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 714 (Dwight ed.). 63. Calvin, " T h e Eternal Predestination of God," in Calvin's Calvinism, Part I, trans, by Henry Cole. 64. "Miscellanies," No. 365, quoted in Smyth, "Jonathan Edwards' 'Idealism,'" American Journal of Theology, I (1897), 953 ff. 65. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 676 (Dwight ed.). 66. Lyon, Idéalisme en Angleterre, p. 426. 67. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 146. 68. Original Sin, in Works, II, 487 (New York ed.).

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»75

69. "Miscellanies," No. 1263, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, pp. 185, 192. In the most recent discussion of Edwards on causality, Paul Ramsey points to the parallelism between Edwards and Hume who, like Edwards, defines liberty as "a power of acting or not acting, according to the determination of the will" ("Of Liberty and Necessity," An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, viii, 1). "In this and other respects in the development of modern ideas," says Ramsey, "Edwards is to Locke as Hume is to Locke" ("Editor's Introduction," in Works, I, 14 (Yale ed.). But Ramsey finds that Edwards' understanding of causality has even more in common with Leibniz' principle of "sufficient reason." Here is his summary on Edwards: "Edwards moved in two directions when abandoning the notion of efficient causation. One of these directions, it has already been pointed out, was toward a definition of cause as 'connection,' and in this he was like Hume. Yet unlike Hume he believed in the certainty of connection and that the certainty is inherent in things connected because it is a certainty sustained there by the rational will of God, and in this he moved in the direction of supplementing crude efficient causation with Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason, or the idea of cause as ground." (Ibid., p. 118.) 70. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 196. 71. Tillich says: "In order to disengage the divine cause from the series of causes and effects, it is called the first cause, the absolute beginning. What this means is that the category of causality is being used not as a category but as a symbol. And if this is done and is understood, the difference between substance and causality disappears, for if God is the cause of the entire series of causes and effects, he is the substance underlying the whole process of becoming. But this 'underlying' does not have the character of a substance which underlies its accident and which is completely expressed by them. It is an underlying in which substance and accidents preserve their freedom. In other words, it is substance not as a category but as a symbol. And, if taken symbolically, there is no difference between prima causa and ultima substantia." (Ibid., p. 238.) 72. If Edwards still sounds like a pure pantheist, it might be worthwhile to recall the answer Nicholas Cusanus gave to John Wenck when the latter accused him of pantheism: "Per hoc enim, quod omnia sunt in Deo ut causata in causa, non sequitur causatum esse causam." ("Because all things are in God as things

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THEISM

caused are in the cause, it hardly follows that what is caused is itself the cause.") Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, I, 285; cited in Ray C. Petry, ed., Late Medieval Mysticism ("Library of Christian Classics," Vol. XIII; Westminster Press, 1957). 73. Buber, I and Thou, p. 79. 74. Calvin, Institutes, I, xv, 5. 75. The nearest Calvin comes to conceding that there is a pantheistic element in the Christian doctrine of God is seen in the following reluctant statement: "I confess, indeed, that the expression, that nature is God, may be used in a pious sense by a pious mind; but, as it is harsh and inconsistent with strict propriety of speech, nature being rather an order prescribed by God, it is dangerous in matters so momentous, and demanding peculiar caution, to confound the Deity with the inferior course of his works" (Institutes, I, v, 5). According to Tillich, "the pantheistic element in the classical doctrine that God is ipsum esse, being-itself, is as necessary for a Christian doctrine of God as the mystical element of the divine presence" (Systematic Theology, I, 233 f.). "In my opinion," writes Walter Horton, "we cannot afford to abandon this central idea of liberalism [the idea of continuity, of the unity of all things in God], however we may be forced to qualify it. If an unqualified emphasis upon unity, organism, continuity lands us in a sort of pantheism, an unqualified revolt against it may land us in an equally disastrous deism, in which all sense of God's presence as an operative principle in the world may be lost" (Realistic Theology, p. 34). 76. Calvin, Institutes, I, xvi, 1. 77. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 202 f. (New York ed.). This Neoplatonic idea of "one common soul" animating and directing the universe is an unusual expression, even for Edwards. The difference between Edwards and Calvin may be illustrated here by the fact that Calvin quotes a celebrated passage from Vergil in support of a doctrine he is arguing against, while Edwards would have found, and perhaps did find, a certain kinship even with this pre-Christian poet. We have already seen how Edwards felt that Calvin, in rejecting pantheism, had also rejected the Christian element of truth in pantheism which Augustine had exploited. Although Calvin quotes Augustine frequently, Edwards really shared the Augustinian spirit more deeply on this point than Calvin or, for that matter, any of the Reformers. I quote here a portion of Calvin's quotation from Vergil in

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177

which Vergil speaks of God's spirit animating "the world's great whole" like "one common soul." Know, first, a spirit, with an active flame, Fills, feeds, and animates this mighty frame, Runs through the watery worlds, the fields of air. The ponderous earth, the depths of heaven; and there Glows in the sun and moon, and burns in every star. Thus, mingling with the mass, the general soul Lives in the parts, and agitates the whole. Led by such wonders, sages have opined. That bees have portions of a heavenly mind; That God pervades, and, like one common soul. Fills, feeds, and animates the world's great whole; That flocks, herds, beasts, and men, from him receive Their vital breath; in him all move and live. . . . Aeneid vi; Georgia iv; both quoted in Calvin, Institutes I, v, 5. 78. "Miscellanies," No. 150, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 183. 79. De Trinitate libri quindecim, XV, vi, 10; quoted in Przywara, ed., An Augustine Synthesis (London, Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 139. 80. Enarrationes in Psalmos, XXXIV, Sermones ii, 6; quoted in ibid., pp. 104 f. 81. True Virtue, in Works, II, 267 (New York ed.). 82. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 202 (New York ed.). 83. James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (New York, Macmillan, 1942), Preface. 84. "Miscellanies," No. 71, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 156. Although Calvin could say the same, the idea has wider implications in the context of Edwards' doctrine of divine self-communication, to be treated in Chapter Five. 85. Ramsey, "Editor's Introduction," in Works, I, 2 (Yale ed.). 86. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 163 f. (Yale ed.). 87. True Virtue, in Works, II, 270 (New York ed.). IV. THE PROBLEM OF MORAL EVIL

1. Cf. Duthie, God in His World, pp. 52-54: " T h e tragedy and irony of man's sin is that it is his repudiation of that which gives him the very power to repudiate." But, "if God is so distinct

i78

NOTES: T H E PROBLEM O F MORAL EVIL

from us that he is separate, it is very hard to see how sin can be the flouting of his love. . . . Always he is the invisible bridge that spans the gulf between myself and the other. Thus it is that every rejection of the good, every inner betrayal of myself, every injury done to my neighbor, every hardening of my heart against those who care for me, every indifference to the myriad needs of the distressed is a wounding of the divine love which is present throughout the whole fabric of the world." 2. True Virtue, in Works, II, 301 (New York ed.). S. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 697 (Dwight ed.). This aspect of Edwards' thought will be explored more fully in Chapter Five. 4. Miscellaneous Observations, in Works, II, 481 (London ed.). 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., p. 476. 7. Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), a theosophist, makes Satan a member of the Godhead in order to account for evil. 8. Calvin, Institutes, I, xiv, 3. 9. Roback, History of American Psychology, p. 363. 10. Duthie, God in His World, p. 53. 11. Original Sin, in Works, I, 477 (New York ed.). 12. Ibid. 13. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, vii (New York, Dutton, 1932), p. 425. 14. Original Sin, in Works, II, 477 (New York ed.). 15. "Wicked Men Inconsistent with Themselves" (sermon), in Works, Vol. II (London ed.). 16. Edwards' "Interleaved Bible," comment on Galatians v. 17, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). Compare Lecomte du Noüy, Human Destiny (London, Longmans, Green, 1949), in which the Biblical fall is interpreted as "regression" to an earlier evolutionary stage in the life of mankind. 17. Edwards' "Interleaved Bible," comment on Galatians v. 17, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. "Concerning Efficacious Grace," in Works, II, 595 (New York ed.). In confirmation Edwards cites Mastricht, in the "Interleaved Bible," comment on Galatians v. 17, Edwards Manuscripts, (Yale Collection). The note reads: "See Mastricht, 'Theologia de Regeneratione' p. 166." On this fundamental distinction between the "natural" and the "spiritual" sense, says Edwards, lies "the whole difference between Calvinists and Arminians," viz., "the grace or virtue of truly good men, not only differs from the

NOTES: T H E PROBLEM O F MORAL EVIL

»79

virtue of others in degree, but even in nature and kind" (Memoirs of David Brainerd, in Works, I, 664 [New York ed.]). 21. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 209 (Yale ed.). 22. "Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Edwards (A. B. Grosart, ed.), p. 29. 23. Ibid., p. 31. By "principle" Edwards simply means an impulse to action, a motivating power or predisposition. 24. "Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Edwards (A. B. Grosart, ed.), p. 42. As Mastricht had put it, "spiritual light is rather held up to view, than conveyed into the soul" of the natural man (Theoretico-practica Theologia, II, vi, 14). 25. Augustine makes a similar rationalization in his treatise on the Pelagian controversy. See his Works, Vol. V. 26. "Concerning the Divine Decrees," in Works, II, 515 (New York ed.). 27. Roback, History of American Psychology, pp. 28 ff. 28. Ramsey distinguishes determinism from compulsion on the basis of Edwards' distinction between "moral necessity" and "natural necessity." See "Editor's Introduction," in Works, I, 34 E. (Yale ed.). 29. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 399 (Yale ed.). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 403. 32. Ibid., p. 404. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 406. 35. Ibid., p. 407. 36. Augustine, City of God, xi, 23, in Works, Vol. II. This view can be traced in various forms through Plato, Plotinus, and the pseudo-Dionysius. It led Leibniz, and later Voltaire, to conclude that this is "the best of all possible worlds." 37. See Richard Baxter, The Saints' Everlasting Rest (Philadelphia, 1814, first published in London, 1650). 38. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, p. 385. 39. Baillie, And the Life Everlasting, pp. 243-44. 40. "Miscellanies," No. 44, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 241. 41. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 285 f. 42. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 408-9 (Yale ed.). 43. "Concerning the Divine Decrees," in Works, II, 519 (New York ed.). For a Biblical example, see Genesis 1.20: "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. . . . " 44. "Concerning the Divine Decrees," in Works, II, 517 (New York ed.).

i8o

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PROBLEM O F MORAL

EVIL

45. Ibid. 46. Edwards, "Of Being," in Works, I, 707 (Dwight ed.). 47. "Concerning the Divine Decrees," in Works, II, 520 (New York ed.). 48. John Dryden, quoted in Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (London, Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 77. 49. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York, Macmillan, 1902), p. 177. 50. Ibid. Bradley goes on to say that goodness, as well as evil, is but an "appearance" which is transcended in the amorphous "Absolute." This is an implication Edwards could not have drawn bccause he presupposed the ultimate identification of Being and Goodness in God, and argued that all being and goodness on the finite level are "emanations" from God. Moreover, to Edwards, perfection of being is more than "wholeness"; it is "transcendent excellence" creatively communicating itself to finite creatures. 51. "Concerning the Divine Decrees," in Works, II, 545 (New York ed.). 52. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End (New York, Harper, 1952), p. 142. 53. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, p. 392. 54. Charity and Its Fruits, p. 159. 55. Original Sin, in Works, II, 493 (New York ed.). 56. Compare Calvin, Institutes, II, i, 6-8. 57. Edwards shared with his Puritan forebears a realistic consciousness of the subtlety of sin. It is false, however, to suppose that the Puritan laid greater emphasis on evil than on good. It was because he extolled God as the highest good that he condemned its converse, evil. Commenting on this aspect of Puritan thought, R. B. Perry writes that the evil of sin consists "not in its intrinsic painfulness or repugnancy but in the loss of good. T h e quality of the evil followed from the quality of the good; the degree of the evil was proportional to the greatness of the good" (Puritanism and Democracy, p. 222). "Puritanism is the vivid affirmation, at once emotional, practical, and intellectual, of a supreme good, conceived in terms of man's immediate enjoyment of God" (ibid., p. 225). " I n its insistence upon the corollaries of this primary truth—the priority of the supreme good over all intermediate goods, the tendency of intermediate goods through their very goodness, to deflect the will from its true orientation, and the possibility of achieving a new will which should flood and

N O T E S : SELF-GIVING N A T U R E O F

COD

181

regenerate the total life of the individual—puritanism contributed significantly to the history of the human spirit" (ibid., p. 242). 58. True Virtue, in Works, II, 285 (New York ed.). 59. Ibid., p. 285 f. 60. Ibid., p. 268. 61. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 697 (Dwight ed.). This argument is reminiscent of Samuel Clarke as well as of the Cambridge Platonists. 62. Perry Miller characterizes the essence of Puritanism as "cosmic optimism," in New England Mind. 63. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1949), p. 92. 64. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 697 (Dwight ed.). V. SELF-CIVING NATURE OF COD

1. McGiffert, Sr., Protestant Thought before Kant, p. 182. 2. "Miscellanies," No. 448, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 133 f. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. "Miscellanies," No. 1218, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 150. 6. Sermon on James i.17, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). 7. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 209 (New York ed.). 8. Ibid., p. 221. 9. Ibid. 10. Gerhard Kittel's Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neues Testament points out that the translation of cabhodh into doxa in the Septuagint transfigured the classical Greek term from a subjective to an objective connotation (cited in Brunner, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 286n). 11. "Personal Narrative of Conversion," in Works, I, 16 (New York ed.). 12. "Miscellanies," No. 445, in E. C. Smyth, "Jonathan Edwards' 'Idealism,' " American Journal of Theology, I (1897), 953 ff. 13. Ibid., No. 1218. 14. Ibid., No. 370. 15. God Glorified in Man's Dependence (sermon), in Works, IV, 175 (New York ed.). 16. Karl Barth expresses a similar view when he says, "His inmost Self is His self-communication" (Kirchliche Dogmatik, Vol. II, Part I, p. 288; cited in Brunner, Christian Doctrine of God, 204).

NOTES: SELF-CIVINC NATURE O F GOD

17. "Miscellanies," No. 1082, in E. C. Smyth, "Jonathan Edwards' 'Idealism,' " American Journal of Theology, I (1897), 953 ff. 18. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 204 (New York ed.). In Freedom of the Will Edwards had written that God "is in the highest sense an active being, and the highest fountain of life and action" (Works, I, 349 [Yale ed.]). 19. Compare Martin Buber, in I and Thou (Edinburgh, T . a n d T . Clark, 1947), p. 82: " W h a t turgid and presumptuous talk that is about 'the God who becomes'; but we know unshakably in our hearts that there is a becoming of the God that is." 20. "Miscellanies," No. 679, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 138. 21. Ibid. 22. Hartshorne, "Introduction," in Hartshorne and Reese, eds., Philosophers Speak of God, pp. 22, 50. 23. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 532. 24. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 357. 25. "Miscellanies," No. 107, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). 26. Augustine, Confessions, i, 3, in Works, Vol. I. 27. Sermon based on Luke ii.14, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). 28. Sermon on I J o h n iv.12, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). 29. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 255 (New York ed.). 30. Epistolae CLXXXVII, iv, 14-vi, 20; quoted in Erich Przywara, ed., An Augustine Synthesis (London, Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 109. 31. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 255 (New York ed.). 32. "Miscellanies," Nos. 332, 87, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 128. 33. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 679 (Dwight ed.). 34. Smith, Select Discourses, p. 145. 35. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 220 (New York ed.). 36. " T h e Excellency of Christ," in Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption (E. C. Smyth, ed.), pp. 92-97. 37. Ibid. 38. "Extracts from His Diary," in Works, I, 8 (New York ed.). His nineteenth-century biographer observed: " T h e r e was in Jonathan Edwards something of the seer or prophet who beholds by

notes: self-giving n a t u r e o f god

183

direct vision what others know only by report" (Allen, Life and Writings of Edwards, p. 386). 39. "The Beauty of the World," in Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 135. In another place he says: "I believe the variety there is in the rays of the sun and their beautiful colours was designed by the Creator for this very purpose, and indeed that the whole visible creation which is but the shadow of being is so made and ordered by God as to typify and represent spiritual things" (Essay of Edwards on the Trinity [G. P. Fisher, ed.], p. 126). Edwards was undoubtedly inspired by Newton's demonstration of God's existence, in the Optics, based on the exquisite design and intelligence which are exhibited in the construction of the universe, especially in the living organism. 40. "Miscellanies," No. 362, quoted in Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 63. 41. "Types of the Messiah," in Works, IX, 28 (Dwight ed.). Again, "The universe is replenished with His goodness . . . and the communications of his goodness are incessantly issuing from God as from an overflowing fountain, and are poured forth all around in vast profusion into every part of heaven and earth, as light is every moment diffused from the sun" ("Thanksgiving Sermon" of 1734, in Works, II [London ed.]). 42. Miller, New England Mind, p. 162. 43. Miller and Johnson, Puritans, p. 730. 44. Ibid., p. 4. 45. Miller, Edwards, p. 194. 46. Miller and Johnson, Puritans, p. 733. "The transition from this Puritan Platonism to deism and natural religion was easy, gradual, and largely unconscious" (Schneider, History of American Philosophy, p. 9). Renaissance Platonism is one of the sources— not the most important, however—of Congregational Puritanism. Petrus Ramus (1515—86), a French humanist, was converted to Calvinism in 1561. He attacked Aristotelian logic, especially the categories and predicables, which he considered useless. He taught that logic was an art, not a science of proof, substituting a Platonic dialectic for the Aristotelian logic of demonstration. This dialectic had both an analytic and a synthetic aspect. J. H. Alsted, a pupil of Melanchthon, developed this synthetic function into an encyclopedia of arts and sciences. Ram ism was introduced into Cambridge University in 1580, where it contributed to the growth of Cambridge Platonism and led to a vigorous polemic against the Aristotelian Scholasticism

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entrenched at Oxford. Out of this polemic, according to Schneider, came most of the treatises used by the New England clergy and taught as philosophy at Harvard and Yale, namely, those of Richardson, Ames, Perkins, and Preston. T h e Latin treatises of Alsted, Wollebius, Burgersdicius, Beurhusius, Keckermann, Talon, and Ramus underlay these English works. Thomas Hooker, who had emigrated to New England and had been a pupil of Richardson at Cambridge, was the best-informed expositor of the new "dialectical pietism." "This philosophical Puritanism in New England created a distinctive intellectual tradition whose chief themes were the theory of theocratic towns, and the academic development of technologia" (Schneider, History of American Philosophy, p. 6). See also Miller, New England Mind, and Ong, Ramus. 47. See Johannes Cocceius, Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Deo (1648), John Wollebius, Christianae Theologiae Compendium (1626); also Francis Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1679); and Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretico-practica Theologia (1682). For a discussion of this topic, see T . M. Lindsay, " T h e Covenant Theology," British and Foreign Evangelical Review, XXVIII (1879), 522 ff. 48. Miller, " T h e Marrow of Puritan Divinity," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Series II, Vol. XV, p. 274. Thomas Hooker, who emigrated to New England, had been a student of the great Alexander Richardson at Cambridge and was considered the best-informed expositor of the Covenant school of theology in New England. In one of his books on the covenant idea Hooker was carried away to the point of saying, "We have the Lord in bonds, for the fulfilling his part of the covenant" (Faithful Covenanter, p. 22). By contrast, Edwards stressed consistently the freedom of God and his spontaneity as the continuous Creator in both realms: nature and grace. It might be said, without too great a stretch of the imagination, that current Dispensationalism is seventeenth-century Federalism in modern garb. 49. Miller, Introduction to Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 3. 50. Sibbes, Works (Edinburgh, 1862), IV, 213, 241; quoted in Nuttall, Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith, p. 146. Compare Calvin: the world is "a theatre erected for displaying the glory of G o d " (Institutes, I, v, 5). 51. Literature and Theology, p. 206.

NOTES: A " N E W

SENSE O F

THINGS"

52. This idea is developed in Chapter VI. 53. Miller, Introduction to Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 26. 54. Calvin, Institutes, I, v, 2 £. 55. Ibid., I, v, 15. 56. Miscellaneous Observations, in Works, II, 484 (London ed.). 57. Miller, Introduction to Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 29. 58. "Miscellanies," No. 777, quoted in Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. S3. 59. "Miscellanies," No. 42, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 238. 60. "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, 688 (Dwight ed.). 61. "Miscellanies," No. 408, quoted in Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 34. VI. A "NEW SENSE OF THINGS"

1. "Miscellanies," No. gg, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 237. 2. Ibid. 3. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 99 (Yale ed.). 4. For a full discussion of this treatise, see Works, II (Yale ed.). 5. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 100 (Yale ed.). 6. Ibid., p. 96. 7. Essay on the Trinity, p. 115. 8. "Notes on the Mind, in Works, I, 680 (Dwight ed.). 9. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 272 (Yale ed.). The treatise on religious affections was in part a fulfillment of his much earlier intention to write a treatise enquiring into "the nature of the human mind." Compare "Notes on the Mind," in Works, I, Appendix (Dwight ed.). 10. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 272 (Yale ed.). 11. "Knowledge of Divine T r u t h " (sermon), in Works, IV, 5 (New York ed.). 12. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 106 (Yale ed.). 13. Ibid., p. 119. 14. Ibid., p. 107. 15. "Sense of the Heart," in Harvard Theological Review, XLI (April, 1948), 137. See also Religious Affections, in Works, II, 272 (Yale ed.). 16. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, ii. 6. 17. "Sense of the Heart," in Harvard Theological Review, XLI (April, 1948), 133.

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NOTES: A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

18. Ibid., p. 134. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 135. 21. "Miscellanies," No. 26, quoted in Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 49. 22. Essay on the Trinity, p. 83. See also Edwards' "Sense of the Heart," in Harvard Theological Review X L I (April, 1948), 136, a n d J o h n E. Smith's introduction to Edwards' Religious Affections, in Works, I I (Yale ed.). 23. "Unpublished Letter by Jonathan Edwards" (G. P. Clark, ed.), New England Quarterly (June, 1956), p. 229. It is important at this point to caution the reader that Edwards, unlike his contemporary J o h n Wesley, was no religious "perfectionist." I n the same letter he explicitly disavows allegiance to that school of thought which in his century became known as "perfectionism" (the doctrine that a state of freedom from sin is attainable in this life): "I am far from pretending to a discriminating judgment of men's spiritual state, so as infallibly to determine who are true converts and who are not, or imagining that I, or any body else is sufficient for the execution of any such design as the setting u p a Pure Church consisting only of true converts. Nor do I claim any power above my neighbors in this respect. I have seen enough of my own fallibleness, and of the uncertainty of my own judgment in things of this nature, I think, forever to guard me from such folly, or to assume to myself the divine prerogative in this respect. I have constantly borne a full testimony in preaching, writing and conversation against the assuming and arrogance of such as set u p themselves to be discerners of men's hearts, and have promoted separation, under a notion of setting u p pure churches. . . . I have much disliked the tyranny of those who set u p their own experience as a rule to judge others by, and of such as insist on a particular account of the time of conversion, and of the order and method of their experiences" (ibid.). T h i s and passages in his private notebooks indicate that he was aware of the incurable contradictions in human nature, as reflected in the distance between what every Christian is and what he knows he ought to be. (Compare Paul, in Romans 7.13-25.) T h e r e is in all m e n a moral ambivalence—a pull in two directions, toward God a n d away from God. A Christian is one who has learned to live creatively and redemptively in this state of coexistence. In one of the published "Miscellanies" Edwards says, "I think it can be demonstrated that there is not a man on earth, that ever comes u p half way to what the law requires of him; and consequently,

NOTES: A " N E W SENSE O F THINGS"

187

there is in all more want of sincerity, than any actual possession of it." (Remarks on Important Theological Controversies, p. 192.) 24. Smith, "Editor's Introduction," in Works, II, 48 (Yale ed.). 25. "Sense of the Heart," in Harvard. Theological Review, XLI (April, 1948), 137. See also Religious Affections, in Works, II, 272 (Yale ed.). 26. "Sense of the Heart," in Harvard Theological Review, XLI (April, 1948), 136. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 137. 29. Observations Concerning Faith, in Works, II, 628 (New York ed.). 30. Richard Niebuhr, in Beach and Niebuhr, eds., Christian Ethics, p. 385. 31. Richard Sibbes, Works, ed. by A. B. Grosart (7 vols., Edinburgh, 1862-64), III, 434; IV, 334 f., 363; II, 495; IV, 412. Quoted in Nuttall, Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith, p. 39. 32. John Owen, Divine Originall, p. 94; quoted in Nuttall, Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith, p. 39. "In Phillipians 1:9 the knowledge of the saints is called sense; it is a judgment which ariseth from, or at least is joined with sense, a taste, a suitableness that the soul hath to the things revealed." Again, "the understanding, as made spiritual, is the palate of the soul." (Thomas Goodwin, Works [London, 1861], IV, 305 f.; VII, 143. Quoted in Nuttall, Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith, p. 39.) 33. Letter from Edwards to Joseph Bellamy, written at Northampton in 1746; printed in "Six Letters of Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Bellamy" (S. T. Williams, ed.), New England Quarterly, Vol. I (1928). Concerning Mastricht's Theoretico-practica Theologia, Perry Miller comments: "In its 1300 pages the whole of Christian theology and morality, theory and practice, is laid out with a minuteness and precision that bring a hundred years of methodizing to a stupendous fulfillment. Beyond this limit no mortal could go. Every chapter expounds a text, analyzes it grammatically, etymologically, rhetorically, logically, comparatively, extracts all possible doctrines from it, argues all the supporting 'reasons/ raises and answers every conceivable objection, makes the practical applications, and points the moral of every principle. The volume commences with God and the attributes, works its way through creation, apostasy, redemption, the church, and ends with a lengthy treatise on ethics." (New England Mind, p. 96.)

i88

NOTES:

A "NEW

SENSE O F

THINGS"

Edwards' discussions on grace and freedom reflect an indebtedness to Mastricht in both method and thought. A strain of Augustinian illuminism is apparent in Mastricht's doctrine of grace and conversion. Strongly anti-Cartesian, like his teacher Voetius, Mastricht stresses the primacy of the will over the intellect, equating the will with the "heart," or affections. (Theoretico-practica Theologia, II, vi, 14, 26.) 34. Mastricht, Treatise on Regeneration, p. 25. In his "Interleaved Bible" Edwards, in the context of a discussion of the meaning of the term "spiritual," adds the directive: "See Mastricht, Theologia de Regeneratione, p. 661" ("Interleaved Bible," Galatians v.17, Edwards Manuscripts [Yale Collection]). This is a section of Theoretico-practica Theologia, II, vi, which was circulated as a separate publication in New England "to put a stop to the controversy, which seems to be growing among us, relative to regeneration; whether it be wrought by immediate influences of the divine Spirit, or by light as the means" ("Editor's Introduction," in Mastricht, Treatise on Regeneration, p. v). There is no evidence, however, that this separate piece was in print during Edwards' lifetime. His autograph copy of Mastricht's Theoreticopractica Theologia is with his private library at Princeton University Library. 35. "Sense of the Heart," in Harvard Theological Review, XLI (April, 1948), 123-45. 36. See text above, p. 7. 37. Original Sin, in Works, II, 334 (New York ed.). 38. "Miscellanies," No. 539, Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection). 39. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 443 (New York ed.). 40. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, i, 20. 41. See Religious Affections, in Works, II, 20511. (Yale ed.). 42. Miller, Introduction to Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 19. 43. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 205 (Yale ed.). 44. Ibid., p. 214. 45. Ibid., p. 217. 46. Ibid., pp. 205 f.; compare Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, i. 47. Augustine had based his doctrine of the credo ut intelligam on the Septuagint version of Isaiah vii.9. For Augustine's discussion see De libero arbitrio, II, ii. 6 or Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXVIII, Sermones xviii, 3; quoted in Erich Przywara, ed., An

NOTES: A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

189

Augustine Synthesis (London, Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 59. Compare Spinoza's three grades of knowledge: opinion, reason, and faith. 48. "Sense of the Heart," in Harvard Theological Review, X L I (April, 1948), 143 f. 49. Ibid., p. 144. 50. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXVIII, Sermones xviii, 3; quoted in Erich Przywara, ed., An Augustine Synthesis (London, Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 59. 51. See I Corinthians xiii.I2 and Phillipians iii.12. 52. Alfred Tennyson, " T h e Higher Pantheism," in J . D. Morrison, ed., Masterpieces of Religious Verse (New York, Harper, 1948), p. 11. 53. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 444 (New York ed.). 54. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 255 (New York ed.). 55. H. H. Farmer, The World and God, p. 76. 56. Sometime before 1800 a second edition of the sermon was published in Boston, in a collection of Edwards sermons, under the title (not Edwards') "Reality of Spiritual Light." A comparison of the published sermon with the manuscript, dated in Edwards' hand August, 1733, reveals the interesting fact that in preparing the manuscript for publication he lifted one full paragraph out of the "Miscellanies," No. 489. This Miscellany was published in Edinburgh later in the same century, in 1793, as a part of Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects. This has led to the curious result that the same paragraph is printed in two different works. This proves what has always been supposed, that Edwards drew upon his private notebooks in preparing works for publication. 57. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 438 (New York ed.). 58. Ibid., p. 439. 59. Ibid., p. 440. 60. See Essay on the Trinity, passim. 61. Edwards, Remarks on Important Theological Controversies, p. 182. 62. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 107 (Yale ed.). 63. "Miscellanies," No. 408, quoted in Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 34. 64. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 443 (New York ed.). 65. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 298 f. (Yale ed.). 66. Richard Niebuhr, in Beach and Niebuhr, eds., Christian Ethics, p. 382.

igo

NOTES: A " N E W SENSE OF T H I N G S "

67. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 442 f. (New York ed.); the same passage occurs in Religious Affections, in Works, II, 307 f. (Yale ed.). 68. Both Edwards and the Cambridge Platonists drew inspiration from Augustine, though Edwards is more Augustinian in his doctrine of limited grace. "God is everywhere by the presence of His divinity," Augustine could affirm, "but not everywhere by the indwelling of His grace" (Epistolae, CLXXXVII, iv. 14-vi, 20; quoted in Erich Przywara, ed., An Augustine Synthesis [London, Sheed and Ward, 1945], p. 109). The early Quakers developed a subtle, but important, distinction between the latent and the active presence of God's Spirit, depending not upon divine election but instead upon the individual's response to the unrecognized presence of God. A Quaker like John Woolman (1720-72) and a Neoplatonist like John Smith (1618—52) illustrate the fact that a doctrine of religious immediacy such as Edwards embraced is compatible with a wider metaphysical framework than most Puritans had worked out. 69. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 443 (New York ed.). 70. Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 140 (Yale ed.). 71. Ibid., p. 142. According to Mastricht, whose psychology of the will Edwards essentially adopts, "The will accounts that only as good, which is agreeable to its propensity." Consequently the will does not "follow the last dictate of the practical understanding" unless the understanding "dictates agreeably to the propensity of the will" (Treatise on Regeneration, p. 38). "That, upon the whole," Mastricht continues, "is good to the will, which is agreeable to its inclination; wherefore, if the practical judgment determine agreeably to this inclination of the will, the will always follows; but if contrary thereto, however powerful the dictates of the understanding may be; yet the will doth not obey: It is therefore necessary, that in regeneration, a new propensity be infused into the will towards spiritual good, that the practical understanding may dictate agreeably thereto" (ibid., p. 39). Edwards probably had Mastricht in mind when, in Freedom of the Will, he acknowledged that "in some sense, the will follows the last dictate of the understanding. But, then the understanding must be taken in a large sense, as including the whole faculty of perception or apprehension, and not merely what is called reason or judgment." (Works, I, 148, Yale ed.) As already intimated, Edwards equates the will with the "affections" and "incli-

NOTES:

A "NEW

SENSE OF T H I N G S "

19 I

nation of the soul." In his usage, "will" is but a façon de parler, not a thing among things to which freedom may or may not be ascribed. " T o talk of liberty, or the contrary, as belonging to the very will itself, is not to speak good sense; if we judge of sense, and nonsense, by the original and proper signification of words. For the will itself is not an agent that has a will: the power of choosing, itself, has not a power of choosing. T h a t which has the power of volition or choice is the man or the soul, and not the power of volition itself. And he that has the liberty of doing according to his will, is the agent or doer who is possessed of the will; and not the will which he is possessed of. We say with propriety, that a bird let loose has power and liberty to fly; b u t not that the bird's power of flying has a power and liberty of flying. T o be free is the property of an agent, who is possessed of powers and faculties, as much as to be cunning, valiant, bountiful, or zealous. But these qualities are the properties of men or persons and not the properties of properties" (Freedom of the Will, in Works, II, 163 [Yale ed.]). 72. "Miscellanies," No. 123, in Townsend, Philosophy of Edwards, p. 245. In the first volume of the new and complete works of Edwards (Yale ed.), Paul Ramsey notes, in passing, "how wrong it is to reduce J o n a t h a n Edwards' system to that of John Locke, while ignoring the traditional doctrine of infusion and not giving equal weight to his Augustinian doctrine of illumination. Insofar as Locke had great influence, it was not to make Jonathan Edwards some sort of religious naturalist or sensational empiricist, but to provide him with a different philosophical manner of stating the truth contained in these earlier theological points of view. Locke had destroyed the possibility of crediting 'traditional revelation,' since this can afford no new simple ideas; but, as a proper empiricist, he left open the possibility of an 'original revelation,' or 'that first impression which is made immediately by God, on the mind of any man, to which we can not set any bounds' (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, VI, xviii, 2). Jonathan Edwards elaborated his system of religious thought within this opening, and upon the surprising work of God in the Great Awakening" (Ramsey, "Editor's Introduction," in Edwards, Works, I, 43n (Yale ed.). 73. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 76. A theory of knowledge such as Edwards held, with his concern for the ontological character of the idea, is incompatible with a nominalist-empiricist

192

NOTES: A " N E W SENSE O F THINGS"

epistemology. What is termed "nominalism" in Locke is the view that only the individual has ontological reality, and therefore that knowledge is an external act of controlling individual things. "Controlling knowledge," according to Tillich, "is the epistemological expression of a nominalistic ontology; empiricism and positivism are its logical consequences" (ibid., I, 77, 177). 74. A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York, Macmillan, 1929), pp. 328-29. 75. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 286. 76. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 301 (Yale ed.). 77. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 449 (New York ed.). 78. Religious

Affections,

i n Works,

I I , 274 f. (Yale e d . ) .

79. Ibid., p. 275. Again, "When the true beauty and amiableness of the holiness or true moral good that is in divine things, is discovered to the soul, it as it were opens a new world to its views" (ibid., p. 273). 80. "Notes on Science," in Works, I, 716 (Dwight ed.). 81. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 448-49 (New York ed.). 82. See Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, in Works, Vol. I (New York ed.); see also Religious Affections, in Works, Vol. II (Yale ed.). T h e conditions of the New World frontier and the insecurity and anxiety of the first generation had a permanent effect on these second- and third-generation Americans. T h e latter seventeenth and the early eighteenth century was a period of almost continuous warfare. T h e New England frontier •was never out of danger from Indian raids. T h u s the whole atmosphere was filled with alarm. It is a mistake to blame the extravagances of the spiritual awakening on the Awakening itself. Edwards' treatises and his Northampton Church Covenant show t h e good results stripped of all that skeptics blamed on the revival. In 1735 a man tried to cut his throat; later, another succeeded in doing so. These things were attributed to the revival by Charles Chauncy and other critics, but one wonders how many incidents like this were characteristic of the period and of the New England frontier. In telling of the man who committed suicide, Edwards, in his Narrative of Surprising Conversions, says the man had been hopelessly melancholic and evidently had been tainted from birth, since his mother met a similar end. Not much was known then about neuroses or psychoses, but others began to follow his example as a way of escape. It is an interesting fact t h a t George Whitefield's sermons had an effect in New England

NOTES:

A " N E W SENSE O F

THINGS"

'93

they did not have in old England. A. A. Roback, in his History of American Psychology, observes that neurotic tendencies prevailed in New England long before the Great Awakening: "Among the two hundred families living in Northampton there were no doubt scores who were high-strung and even definitely neurotic. Not far away, in Salem, nineteen persons were hanged and one pressed to death about forty years earlier, because of the hysterical tendencies of the victims and the inciting sermons of Cotton Mather" (p. 30). 83. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 252 (Yale ed.). 84. Charles Chauncy, in Seasonable Thoughts, argues that an "enlightened mind," not "raised affections," is the criterion of religious experience. Edwards' Treatise Concerning Religious Affections was an answer to this charge, wherein Edwards takes a middle position. Concerning the favorable results of the Awakening, see my appendix, below. 85. Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, in Works, III, 335 (New York ed.). Published as a separate work in 1740. 86. Smith, "Editor's Introduction," Religious Affections, in Works, II, 34, 47-8 (Yale ed.). 87. See text above, p. 4. 88. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 449 (New York ed.). 89. The Nature of True Virtue, in Works, II, 302 (New York ed.). 90. Although the earlier period of the Reformation carried a mystical emphasis, as seen in Jacques LeF£vre, Sebastian Franck, and Caspar Schwenkfeld, "steadfast adherence of the Protestant leaders to the objective means of grace, the Bible and the sacraments, provoked dissent in the form of mysticism" (Fisher, Christian Doctrine, p. 317). 91. Christian Mysticism (Seventh ed.; London, 1932), pp. 3-22; quoted in Vergilius Ferm, Classics of Protestantism (New York, Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 455. 92. Nuttall, Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith, p. 147. 93. New England Mind, passim; also "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Series II, Vol. XV, p. 274. T h e mystical side of early Puritanism was considerably suppressed by the influence of "Covenant Theology," or "Federalism," in its legalist forms. Miller observes that this new brand of

194

NOTES:

A " N E W SENSE O F

THINGS"

theology began to modify Puritan doctrines as early as 1630, and that it was largely a reaction to the incomprehensible and inscrutable Cod of the more rigid Calvinists. God's eternal law was identified with natural law. L. J . Trinterud attributes it to the influence of "scholastic rationalism" on Puritan thought (Trinterud, American Tradition, pp. 170-87). By implication, in this new theology, reason is completed by revelation, and nature by grace. "The purpose of grace is the perfecting of nature through making obedience to natural law once again possible" (ibid., p. 172). It was based on the view that human reason is the point of contact for the work of the Holy Spirit. Once properly enlightened it would, presumably, guide the will and affections. This is the goal of the work of grace, that the affections should be once again ruled by the reason, instead of by the will as in the unregenerate. This accounts for the emphasis on external "means of grace" and a legalistic ethic in New England, to which Edwards reacted with a vengeance in his countertheories of the immediacy of grace in the soul and the identification of grace and love as the foundation and quintessence of all true religion. Edwards opposed the synergism implied in the Federalist notion of a conditional covenant. Like Calvin he held to only one covenant—the covenant of grace—alluding in one of his "Miscellanies" to "the wrong distinction men make between the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption. . . . That which is commonly called the covenant of grace is only Christ's open and free offer of life, whereby he holds it out in his hands to sinners, and offers it without any condition. . . . Faith cannot be called the condition of receiving it, for it is the receiving itself. . . . It is not proper when a man holds out his gift to a beggar, that he may take it without any preliminary conditions, to say that he makes a covenant with the beggar. No more proper is it to say, that Christ's holding forth life in His hand to us, that we may receive it, is making a covenant with us." (Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption [E. C. Smyth, ed.], Appendix, pp. 64-67.) Again, " T h e Covenant of grace, if hereby we understand the covenant between God the Father and believers in Christ, . . . is indeed without any proper conditions to be performed by us. Faith is not properly the condition of this covenant, but the righteousness of Christ" (ibid., pp. 70 f.). In conclusion, "there have never been two covenants, in strictness of speech, but only two ways

NOTES: A " N E W SENSE OF THINGS"

»95

constituted of performing this [one] covenant [of grace or redemption]" ("Miscellanies," No. 35, Edwards Manuscripts, [Yale Collection]). 94. Visser't Hooft, Background of Social Gospel, p. 82. 95. Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith, passim. 96. Ibid., p. 146. Though mysticism was not the basis of Puritanism, there was a mystical element in the early Puritan doctrine of grace, and the same is perceptible later in German Pietism. C. E. Luthardt, in Geschichte der Christlichen Ethik (Leipzig, 1893), holds the view that Puritanism was the source of the Inner Light doctrine of the Quakers, tracing the source back to Francis Rous. Ernst Troeltsch, in Gesammelte Schriften (Germany, 1912-25), Vol. I, holds a similar view. Nuttall's thesis is essentially the same. This can be explained by the fact that many of the Puritans, before Cromwell's time, returned for inspiration to the writings of the Dionysius, Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventura, Ruysbroeck, Thomas k Kempis, Boehme, Tauler, et al. According to Professor Haller, after the year 1600, vernacular versions of the writings of continental mystics began to appear in England. The anonymous Theologia Germanica (published by Luther in 1518) was translated and published in English by Everard. Others included The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, by Sebastian Franck, The Vision of God, by Nicholas Cusanus, and selections from Hermes Trismegistus, Dionysius, Denck, Tauler, et al. In this same period Richard Sibbes and John Preston were insisting on the immediacy of God in creation and the human soul. (Haller, Rise of Puritanism, pp. 206-9.) 97. In Journal of Religion, Vol. XXVIII (January, 1948). 98. Jerald Carl Brauer, "Francis Rous, Puritan Mystic, 1579— 1659; An Introduction to the Study of the Mystical Element in Puritanism." Unpublished doctoral thesis, Divinity School, Univ. of Chicago, 1948. 99. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 210 (New York ed.). 100. See Religious Affections, passim, in Works, II (Yale ed.). 101. "Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Edwards (A. B. Grosart, ed.), p. 52. 102. God's End in Creation, in Works, II, 255 (New York ed.). 103. Theoretico-practica Theologia, II, vi, 11. 104. "Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Edwards (A. B. Grosart, ed.), pp. 53 ff. 105. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 440 (New York ed.).

NOTES:

A "NEW

SENSE O F

THINGS"

106. Sermon on Romans ii.10, in Works. II, 890 (London ed.). 107. "Miscellanies," No. 539, Edwards Manuscripts [Yale Collection], transcribed by T . A. Schafer. 108. Justification by Faith, in Works, IV, 71 (New York ed.). 109. "Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Edwards (A. B. Grosart, ed.), p. 53; see also Religious Affections, p. 352, et passim. 110. "Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Edwards (A. B. Grosart, ed.), p. 55. 111. True Grace (sermon), in Works, IV, 469 (New York ed.). 112. Religious Affections, in Works, II, 206 (Yale ed.). 115. Ibid., p. 72. 114. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, iv, (London, Dutton, 1932), 277. 115. "Miscellanies," No. 260, quoted in Images of Divine Things (Perry Miller, ed.), p. 22. 116. Supernatural Light, in Works, IV, 449 (New York ed.). 117. "Pure in Heart," (sermon), in Works, II, p. 909 (London ed.). VII. CONCLUSIONS

1. Miller, "General Editor's Note," in Works, I, viii (Yale ed.). 2. Noah Porter, "Appendix on English and American Philosophy," in Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, II, 444. 3. Edwards Manuscripts (Yale Collection), Folder XI. T h e same title appears in Edwards' hand on the outside of an old letter attached to his "Catalogue of Books," p. L.5. 4. Van Doren, ed., Franklin and Edwards, p. xvii. 5. See Haroutunian, Piety Versus Moralism, passim. 6. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 97. 7. Haroutunian, Piety Versus Moralism, p. xxii. On Nathaniel Taylor see Essays on the Means of Regeneration (New Haven, Conn., 1829) and Lectures on the Moral Government of God (New York, 1859). 8. It may be observed that the four most influential Protestant theologians in the world today belong to the tradition known as the "Reformed Faith," and that some critics outside this tradition have seen in the "New Reformation Theology" signs of a twentieth-century reformation. 9. Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, I, 131 (Yale ed.). 10. Haroutunian, Piety Versus Moralism, pp. xxiv f.

NOTES:

CONCLUSIONS

»97

11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung (1951); English translation, Letters and Papers from Prison (London, Student Christian Movement Press, 1953), Letters of 30 April 1944 and 25 May 1944, pp. 103-4. 12. Heim, Faith and Science, p. 171. 13. John iv.21-4 (R.S.V.). 14. Edwards, Religious Affections, in Works, II, 452 (Yale ed.). 15. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, p. 185. 16. Miller, Edwards, p. xii. 17. "Aurora Leigh," in J . D. Morrison, ed.. Masterpieces of Religious Verse (New York, Harper, 1948), p. 16.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS

C O L L E C T E D WORKS

The Works of President Edwards. Edited by Samuel Austin. 8 vols. Worcester, Mass., 1808-9. The Works of President Edwards. Edited by Sereno E. Dwight. 10 vols. New York, 1829-30. The Works of President Edwards. Edited by Edward Hickman. 2 vols. London, 1834. The Works of President Edwards. Edited and published by Robert Carter and Brothers. (A reprint of the Worcester edition, with additions from other sources.) 4 vols. New York, 1881. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. General editor, Perry Miller. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1957-. Vol. I, 1957; Vol. II, 1959. WORKS USED IN THIS STUDY W H I C H APPEAR

IN COLLECTED

EDITIONS

AND WHICH HAVE ALSO BEEN P U B L I S H E D S E P A R A T E L Y

A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, Which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. Boston, 1754. A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to Be Both a Scriptural and Rational Doctrine. Boston, 1734. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton and the Neighboring Towns and Villages. (From a letter to the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Colman of Boston.) Boston, 1737. A History of the Work of Redemption, Containing the Outlines of A Body of Divinity. Edinburgh, 1774. An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd—Chiefly Taken from his own Diary and Other Private

200

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS

Writings, Written for His Own Use and Now Published. Boston, 1749. An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth. Boston, 1747. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. (In three parts.) Boston, 1746. God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man's Dependence upon Him in the Whole of It. Boston, 1731. "Justification by Faith Alone," in Discourses

on Various

Impor-

tant Subjects. Boston, 1738. Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects. Edited by John Erskine. Edinburgh, 1793. Remarks on Important Theological Controversies. Edited by John Erskine. London, 1796. Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England. Boston, 1742. The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. Boston, 1741. The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended. Boston, 1758. True Grace, Distinguished from the Experience of Devils. (From a sermon preached before the synod of New York.) New York, 1753. Two Dissertations: I. Concerning the End for Which God Created the World; II. The Nature of True Virtue. Boston, 1765. W O R K S USED IN T H I S STUDY W H I C H DO NOT APPEAR IN C O L L E C T E D EDITIONS

An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity. Edited by G. P. Fisher. New York, 1903. "A Treatise on Grace," in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Jonathan Edwards of America. Edited by A. B. Grosart. Edinburgh, 1865. Charity and Its Fruits, or Christian Love as Manifested in the Heart and Life. Edited by Tryon Edwards. London, 1851. "Ideas, Sense of the Heart, Spiritual Knowledge or Conviction." Edited by Perry Miller, Harvard Theological Review, XLI (April, 1948), 123-45.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF

JONATHAN

EDWARDS

201

Images or Shadows of Divine Things. Edited by Perry Miller. New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1948. "Miscellanies," selected by F. B. Dexter, in " T h e Manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Second Series), XV (1901-2), 15 ff. "Miscellanies," selected by E. A. Park, in "Remarks of Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity," Bibliotheca Sacra, XXXVIII (1881), 155-64. "Miscellanies," selected by E. C. Smyth, in Appendices to Exercises Commemorating the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Jonathan Edwards. Andover, Mass., 1904. "Miscellanies," selected by E. C. Smyth, in "Jonathan Edwards' 'Idealism,' " American Journal of Theology, I (1897), 955-65. "Miscellanies," selected by E. C. Smyth, in "Professor Allen's Jonathan Edwards, With Extracts from Copies of Unpublished Manuscripts," Andover Review, XIII (1890), 285-304. "Miscellanies," selected by H. G. Townsend, in The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from his Private Notebooks. Eugene, Ore., University of Oregon Press, 1955. Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption. Edited by E. C. Smyth. New York, 1880. "Six Letters of Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Bellamy," edited by S. T. Williams, New England Quarterly, I (1928), 226-42. "Unpublished Letter of Jonathan Edwards," edited by G. P. Clark, New England Quarterly, XXIX (1956), 228-33. IMPORTANT MANUSCRIPTS

"Miscellanies" Journal. The Yale Collection (Yale University Library), has ten separate notebooks containing a total of 1,360 entries. Approximately one half of the entries have been published in scattered sources, as indicated above in this bibliography. In the projected Yale University Press edition of Edwards' collected works, a total of twenty-five volumes are anticipated, five of which will include the entire "Miscellanies" Journal. The first volume of "Miscellanies" in this edition is expected to appear in 1960. Sermons. Approximately 1,200 autographs exist, 1.150 of which are in the Yale Collection, and another 55 of which are part of the Andover Collection (Andover-Newton Theological Seminary Library). Only 568 are full-length manuscripts, 70 of

202

BIBLIOGRAPHY O F J O N A T H A N

EDWARDS

which have been published—10 in his lifetime. The remainder are outlines or mere fragments. The Yale edition of the collected works promises five volumes of sermons, the first of which is expected to appear in 1961. Letters. An indefinite number exist, most of which are part of the Andover Collection, although both Yale and Princeton University libraries contain a few. Both official and personal, some full-length and others fragmentary, the letters in the Andover Collection are classified according to dates ranging from 1716 to 1758. Most of the important letters have been published in the Dwight and Winslow biographies and in the New England Quarterly. A volume of letters is expected to appear in the Yale edition of the collected works. "A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted." Part of the Yale Collection, this is a single folio leaf with rough notes in three separate columns, the entries numbering one to ten. These are thought to be notes for a projected treatise on Christian philosophy, covering perhaps several volumes. "Catalogue of Books." In the Yale Collection. Forty-three pages in length, this is the now-famous list, which Edwards kept throughout his career, of books he intended to read or purchase. "Book of Controversies." In the Yale Collection. This is a homemade book of 298 pages with double columns of rough notes on various doctrinal controversies. Edwards incorporated some of this material into his published treatises on controversial subjects. "Harmony of the Genius, Spirit, Doctrines and Rules of the Old Testament and the New." In the Yale Collection. This is 196 pages of notes for a projected treatise on the subject, to extend perhaps to several volumes. Next to his "Rational Account" and "History of Redemption" this was his most ambitious project. "Interleaved Bible." In the Yale Collection. This is a King James "Blank Bible" with space for annotations. Edwards' notes on the Scripture extend to three volumes. He made short annotations on the folio pages of the blank Bible with cross-indexing to lead to longer reflections in separate manuscript volumes. He calls these volumes "Notes on the Scriptures." They are the beginning of a full-scale commentary on the Bible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aaron, Daniel, ed. America in Crisis. New York, Knopf, 1952. Aldrich, A. O. "Edwards and Hutcheson," Harvard Theological Review, Vol. X L I V (January, 1951). "Jonathan Edwards and William Godwin on Virtue," American Literature, Vol. X V I I I (January, 1947). Allen, A. V. G. Life and Writings of Jonathan Edwards. Edinburgh, T . & T . Clark, 1889. Ames, William. Medulla sacrae theologiae. 1623. Translated as The Marrow of Sacred Divinity. London, 1642. Anderson, P. H., and M. H. Fisch. Philosophy in America. New York, Appleton, 1939. Atkins, G. G., and F. L. Fagley. History of American Congregationalism. Chicago, Pilgrim, 1942. Augustine, Aurelius. Works. Translated by Marcus Dods. Vols. I - V I I I of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (1st Series). New York, 1886-88. Bacon, L. W. A History of American Christianity. London, Clarke, 1899. Baillie, John. And the Life Everlasting. London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1940. Our Knowledge of God. London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1949. Bancroft, George. History of the United States. 2 vols. New York, Appleton, 1916. Bayle, Pierre. Dictionary Historical and Critical. London, 1710. Beach, Waldo, and H. Richard Niebuhr, eds. Christian Ethics: Sources of the Living Tradition. New York, Ronald, 1955. Bellamy, Joseph. True Religion Delineated. Glasgow, 1828. First published 1750, with preface by Jonathan Edwards. Berkeley, George. The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Edited by A. A. Luce and T . E. Jessop. 4 vols. London, Nelson, 1948.

204

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blair, Walter, et al., eds. The Literature of the United States. 2 vols. New York, Scott, Foresman, 1950. Bonthius, R. H. Christian Paths to Self-Acceptance. New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1948. Bradshaw, William. English Puritanisme, containing the maine opinions of the rigidest sort of those that are called Puritanes in the Realme of England. 1605. Brauer, J . C. "Francis Rous, Puritan Mystic, 1579-1659." Unpublished doctoral thesis, Divinity School, University of Chicago. "Puritan Mysticism and the Development of Liberalism," Church Histoty, Vol. X I X (1950). British and Foreign Evangelical Review. " T h e Theology of Edwards as Shewn in his Treatise on Religious Affections," Vol. I X (1860). "Edwards and the Theology of New England," Vol. V I I (1858). Bronkema, Ralph. The Essence of Puritanism. Netherlands, Goes, 1929. Brown, W. A. "Federal Theology," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. 12 vols. New York, Scribner, 1913-21. Brunner, Heinrich Emil. The Christian Doctrine of God (Dogmatics, Vol. I). Translated by Olive Wyon. London, Lutterworth, 1949. Burggraaff, Winfield. The Rise and Development of Liberal Theology in America. New York, Reformed Church Publishers, 1928. Byington, E. H. The Puritan as a Colonist and a Reformer. London, Gay k Bird, 1899. The Puritan in England and New England. London, Sampson Low, Maston, 1896. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. 2 vols. Translated by John Allen. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, n.d. " T h e Eternal Predestination of God," in Calvin's Calvinism. Part I. Translated by Henry Cole. London, 1857. Campbell, Douglass. The Puritan in Holland, England, and America. 2 vols. London, 1892. Canby, H. S. Classic Americans. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1932. Carpenter, F. I. " T h e Radicalism of Jonathan Edwards," New England Quarterly, Vol. IV (1931).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

205

Caskey, J. S., ed. "Jonathan Edwards' Catalogue." Unpublished B.D. thesis, in Hammond Library, Chicago Theological Seminary, 1931. Chauncy, Charles. Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England. Boston, 1743. Chubb, Thomas. "A Short Dissertation on Providence," in Collection of Tracts. London, 1730. Clark, G. N. The Seventeenth Century. Oxford, Clarendon, 1947. Cole, P. R., ed. A Neglected Educator: Johann Heinrich Aisted. Sydney, Australia, 1910. Crabtree, A. B. Jonathan Edwards' View of Man: A Study in Eighteenth Century Calvinism. Wallington, Eng., Religious Education Press, 1948. Cragg, G. R. From Puritanism to the Age of Reason. Cambridge, England, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1950. Craig, Hardin. The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature. New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1936. Cremeans, C. D. The Reception of Calvinistic Thought in England. Urbana, Illinois, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1949. Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London, 1678. Curtis. M. M. "Kantian Elements in Jonathan Edwards," Philosophische Abhandlungen (1906). Cusanus, Nicholas. De Visione Dei. Basle, 1565. Translated as The Vision of God by E. G. Salter. London, Dent, 1928. Dexter, F. B. A Documentary History of Yale University. New Haven, Conn., Yale Univ. Press, 1916. A Sketch of the History of Yale University. New York, Holt, 1887. Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College (1701-1745). New York, Holt, 1885. "The Manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Series II, Vol. XV (1901-2). Dexter, F. B., ed. The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College. New York, Scribner, 1901. De Jong, P. Y. The Covenant Idea in New England Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1945. DeWitt, John. "Jonathan Edwards: A Study," Princeton Theological Review, Vol. II (1904).

2O6

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INDEX Age of reason, theology of, 37-38, 150 American Calvinism, Edwards and, 153 Ames, William, 106 Anselm, Saint, and proof of God's existence, 16 Antinomianism, 37, 105, 142 Arianism, 37 Arminianism, 105; five points of, 37-38 Augustine, Saint, as founder of mystical realism, 23; Edwards' knowledge of writings of, 2930; on God's creativity, 35; quoted, 36, 99, 113, 127-28; on evil, 68, 73-74; writings influence Puritans, 77; on creation, 97; on divine illumination, 122; on faith, 127 Augustinian Calvinism, 153 Baillie, John, 129; quoted, 78-79 Bayly, Lewis, cited, 144 Beauty, God as supreme, 27-28, 88-89; from God, 100-101; spiritual, 134; see also God, beauty of Being, 25-26, 58; gradualist theory of, 28; nature of, 39-40, 6061; nature of, in man, 61-64; perverted by evil, 69 "Being-in-general," 12, 26 ff., 60 Berdyaev, Nicolas, 84, 88 Berkeley, George, 31, 40; influence on Edwards, 169 (n. 51) Blanton, Smiley, 87

Boehme, Jacob, 178 (n. 7) Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, quoted, 156 Bradley, F. H., quoted, 83-84 Brauer, Jerald C., cited, 144, quoted, 144-45 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, quoted, 160 Buber, Martin, 129; quoted, 58 Butler, Joseph, 50 Calvin, John, influences on philosophy of, 30; influence of, on Edwards, 30-31, 155; differs from Edwards, 58; on evil, 68, 85; on revelation, 108 Calvinism, Edwards and, 3, 5-7, 9, 155; in New England, 5; see also American Calvinism, Augustinian Calvinism, Neo-Calvinism Cambridge Platonists, 134-35, 142, 183 (n. 46) Causality, 52-60; as proof of God's existence, 13-16; mechanical, as deistic concept, 31; Calvin and, 53, 58; and evil. 67-68 Chauncy, Charles, 140—41 Christ, as the center of history, 45-47; as the immediate light, 133 "Christian apologetics," classical period of, 50-51 Chubb, Thomas, cited, 38 Clarke, Samuel, and supernaturalism, 50; as moderate deist, 164 (n. 7); influence of, on Edwards, 165 (n. 7), 181 (n. 61)

2l6 C o n v e r s i o n , 121, 127 C o v e n a n t of Grace, 194 (n. 93) C o v e n a n t theology, 106, 147, 19394 (n. 93) C r e a t i o n , 55; theories of, 35; D a r winism affects d o c t r i n e s of, 59 C r e a t i v i t y , i m m e d i a t e , see G o d , c o n t i n u o u s l y creative C u d w o r t h , R a l p h , 40 C u s a n u s , N i c h o l a s , 166 (n. 30), 167 (n. 46), 175 (n. 72) D a r w i n , C h a r l e s , 59 D a v e n p o r t , J a m e s , 141 Deism, 37, 113, 142; i n r a t i o n a l istic theism, 3; d i s t r u s t s mysticism, 37, 113; a n d s u p e r n a t u r a l ism, 50-51; i n f l u e n c e d by N e w t o n , 105 D e t e r m i n i s m , in E d w a r d s , 68 D i s p e n s a t i o n a l i s m , 184 (n. 48) D r y d e n , J o h n , q u o t e d , 83 D u a l i s m , 6, 9, 20, 65, 68, 77 D u n s Scotus, J o h n , i n f l u e n c e of, o n Calvin, 30 D u t h i e , C h a r l e s , 69 E d d i n g t o n , A r t h u r , 9; q u o t e d , 138 Edwards, Jonathan, compared w i t h B e n j a m i n F r a n k l i n , 2; intellectual integrity of, 3; as theologian a n d p h i l o s o p h e r u n i t e d , 3, 150, 151; a n d C a l v i n i s m , 3, 5 - 8 , 9, 154-55; as psychologist, 4; a n d S0ren K i e r k e g a a r d , 4, 118-19; relevance of, today, 4, 151-57; a n d mysticism, 6, 145 ff.; a s synthesist, 10; a n d P u r i t a n s , 10, 104-5, 107, 121-22, 142^15: a n d J o h n Calvin, 30, 58, 68, 85, 108, 155; a n d N e o p l a t o n i s m , 3 0 31, 134-35, 142, 183 (n. 46); a n d Isaac N e w t o n , 31, 48, 159; a n d A u g u s t i n e , 35, 97, 122, 127; a n d K a r l H e i m , 41; a n d J o h n S m i t h , 100; a n d P e t r u s v a n M a s t r i c h t , 120-22, 173 (n. 40), 178 (n. 20),

INDEX 179 (n. 24), 188 (nn. 33.34), 190 (n. 71); a n d J o h n Locke. 125, 159; a n d C h a r l e s C h a u n c y , 14041; a n d Francis Rous, 144; follows t h e scientific spirit, 151; t r u s t s in e n l i g h t e n e d human reason, 151-53; as " m e d i a t i n g t h e o l o g i a n , " 152-53; influence of, on eighteenth-century thought, 154; a n d " N e w E n g l a n d T h e ology," 154-55; a n d t h e " G r e a t A w a k e n i n g , " 161; a n d S a m u e l Clarke, 164-65 (n. 7); as a mystical realist, 166 (n. 30); and G e o r g e Berkeley, 169 (n. 51); a n d Nicolas M a l e b r a n c h e , 170 (n. 51); scientific theories of, 171-72 (n. 7); a n d J o h n Wesley, 186 (n. 23) writings: "Concerning the D i v i n e Decrees," q u o t e d , 81, 8 2 83, 84; A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to Be Both a Scriptural and a Rational Doctrine, 131, q u o t e d , 134, 135, 141, 146; The End for Which God Created the World (God's End in Creation), 15, 90, q u o t e d , 21, 5 9 , 9 1 , 92, 99, 100, 130; Essay on the Trinity, 122; "Excellency," q u o t e d , 87; " T h e Excellency of C h r i s t , " q u o t e d , 101; Freedom of the Will, q u o t e d , 34-35, 75, 76-77, 81, 136; History of the Work of Redemption, 45; Images of Divine Things: the Language and Lessons of Nature or the Book of Nature and Common Providence, 104, 108; Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects, q u o t e d , 109; "Miscellanies," 51, 91, 164 (n. 19), q u o t e d , 4, 17-18, 38-39, 45, 48, 55. 80, 91-92, 9 5 96, 99, 110-11, 123, 132, 136,

INDEX

Edwards, J., writings (Con/.) 141; The Nature of True Virtue, quoted, 28, 142; "Notes on the Mind," quoted, 53, 99; "Notes on Science," quoted, 13, 34, 40, 43; Original Sin, quoted, 44, 123; Personal Narrative, 131, quoted, 139; " T h e Pure in Heart," quoted, 149; "A Rational Account of the Principles and Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion" (projected), 32, 152; " T h e Sense of the Heart," 12223, quoted, 120; "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," 2; Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 122, quoted, 73, 114, 115, 126, 133, 139, 150; Treatise on Grace, 122, quoted, 147 Einstein, Albert, 43 Election, doctrine of, 74, 134 Empiricism, Edwards and, 52, 5657, 115-17, 121-25, 128, 191-92 (n.73) Enfield sermon, 2 "Enthusiasm," as fanaticism in religion, 37, 105, 113, 140 Erigena, John Scotus, 172 (n. 17) Eternal punishment, 4, 78-80; origin of doctrine of, 78 Everard, John, 144 Evil, problem of moral, 65-89; definition of moral, 67; natural, 67; causality and, 67-68; negation of Being, 68-70; not i n h e r e n t in n a t u r e , 68-70; moral evil source of all, 69; God wills and permits, 75-77; as a minus quantity, 76; good out of, 80-85; existential significance of, 82 Existentialism, 10, 62, 119, 153 Faith, as a unique intuition, 1618, 125-27, 133; Calvin on, 109 Farmer, H. H„ 129; quoted, 13031

217 Federalism, 109; see also Covenant theology Ferm, Vergilius, quoted, 6 Frank, S. L., quoted, 12 Franklin, Benjamin, compared with Edwards, 2; cited, 50-51 Freedom, ontological, 64; of the will, 63, 136 Freud, Sigmund, 74 Fundamentalism, deistic remnants of. 3 God, immediacy of, 3, 23, 37, 39, 90-93, 129, 144; relation of, to the world, 6-7, 18-22, 51, 60, 155-58; concept of, 8, 9-11, 15659; presence of, 9, 16, 18, 33, 41, 59; proofs of existence of, 1316, 24, 110, and see also Causality, Necessity, Revelation; continuously creative, 15, 35-39, 43-45, 51-52, 80. 94, and see also Creation; knowledge of, 17, 22-23, 112, 129-30, 157; transcendence of, 18-19, 22. 60-61, 98; fulness of. 21, 98, 130, 146; essence of, 22, 98; self-sufficiency of, 28; self-communication of, 37. 56, 66, 89, 90-94, 130. 13233, 136; self-giving nature of, 62, 90-112, 137, 145; essential glory of, 91; presence of, manifested in symbols, 110-11; experience of, 123; self-movement of, 130; beauty of, 139-40, 14849 Grace, 73, 134, 145-48; essence of, 136 Gravitation, theory of: universal, 42; effect on philosophy, 48-49 "Great Awakening," 140, 161-62, 192 (n. 82) Guilt, 69 Haroutunian, Joseph, quoted, 154— 55

INDEX

2 l8 Hartshorne, Charles, 15; on relation of God to world, 19, 95 Heim, Karl, 18, 19, 129; "suprapolar space" of, 41 Hell, see Eternal punishment History, sacred, related to calendar history, 45-47 Hobbes, Thomas, 51 Holy Spirit, 137, 146; means by which God communicates, 9594; Puritan doctrine of, 107, 143; as holy love, 135 Hooft, Visser't, quoted, 145 Horton, Walter, cited, 7, 176 (n.75) Hudson, Winthrop, cited, 143-44 Hume, David, compared with Edwards, 55, 175 (n. 69); on secondary causes, 55-54; on proof of God's existence, 165 (n. 12) Hutcheson, Francis, cited, 121 Idealism, 166 (n. 50), 171 (n. 52); sources of Edwards' early, 169 (n.5I) Illumination, 122, 141 Immediacy, see God, immediacy of Inge, W. R., quoted, 145 Instrumentalism, 117 Jeans, James, 9; quoted, 61 Kant, Immanuel, on causality, 53; on proof of God's existence, 165 (n. 12) Kierkegaard, S0ren, 129, 154; compared with Edwards, 4, 118-19 Knowledge, integration of, 9-10, 54, 152; sensible, 119-20; speculative, 119-20; nature of, 12728, 141; levels of, 137 Krause, Karl C. F., 57 Latitudinarianism, 57 Lecomte du Noüy, Pierre, (n. 16)

178

Leibniz, Gottfried, and supernaturalism, 50; theodicy of, 77 Liberalism, religious, deistic remnants of, 3 Locke, John, 125; on knowledge of God, 25; materialistic tendencies, 51; distrusts mysticism, 57; on Being, 40; and supernaturalism, 50; on mental acts, 114, 115, 116; cited, 121; liberated physical sciences from metaphysics, 124; influence of, on Edwards, 125, 159; on "ideas," 128 Love, learned through suffering, 88 Lovejoy, Arthur, 28 Lyon, Georges, quoted, 54 McGiffert, A. C„ Sr., quoted, 50, 90 Malebranche, Nicolas, cited, 26; on Being, 40; on causality, 55; influence of, on Edwards, 170 (n.51) Man, natural, contrasted to spiritual, 152 Mastricht, Petrus van, 106, 156; influence of, on Edwards, 121-22, 175 (n. 40), 178 (n. 20), 179 (n. 24), 188 (nn. 55,54), 190 (n. 71); belief that actions follow inclinations, 156 Materialism, counteracted by Edwards, 51-32 Mather, Cotton, 108, 144 Mechanism, denied by Edwards, 52 Miller, Perry, quoted, 57-58, 104, 106, 108, 110, 125, 160; cited, 145 Mohammed, and determinism, 68 Monism, 6, 84 More, Henry, 40 Morison, Samuel Eliot, quoted, 5 Murdock, K. B., quoted, 107

219

INDEX

Mysticism, 142-45; possible in Calvinism, 6; Christian, 62-63; repudiated by rationalist Puritans, 105; contemplative, 135 Naturalism, 23, 52 Natural law, deistic concept of, 31 Natural world, in relation to God, 102-12; Puritanism and, 103-8; Calvin on, 107-9 Nature, laws of, 52 Necessity, as proof of God's existence, 14-16 Neo-Calvinism, Edwards and, 3, 6-7, 9-11, 155 Neoplatonism, Edwards' knowledge of writings on, 30; as climate of Edwards' thought, 3031; "World-Soul" and, 40; see also, Cambridge Platonists New England, religious climate of, 4-5, 37-38, 105-6, 116-18, 154, 192 (n. 82) "New England Theology," 154-55 "New R e f o r m a t i o n T h e o l o g y , " 151, 196 (n. 8) Newton, Isaac, influence of, on deism, 31, 105; cosmological implications of theory of gravitation of, 42; on God's intervention in solar system, 50 Newtonian physics, dangers of lack of philosophic orientation, 48; significance for Christianity, 117; and Edwards' thought, 159 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 19, 71 Niebuhr, Richard, quoted, 4, 120, 134-B5 N o m i n a l i s m , 166 (n. 30), 191-92 (n.73) "Northampton Controversy," 118 Nuttall, G. F„ quoted, 143 Ontology, Edwards" first approach to theology, 14 Original sin, 68, 86

Owen, John, influence of, on Edwards, 107; quoted, 121 Paley, William, and supernaturalism, 50 Panentheism, and Edwards' "third way," 21-22; suggested by Malebranche and Newton, 40; as concept of Karl C. F. Krause, 57; history of the concept of, 99-100 Pantheism, 6, 176 (n. 75); a fallacy, according to Hartshorne, 19; on relation of God to world, 20-21; Edwards finds element of truth in, 57; Calvin's argument against, 58; and evil, 68 Pascal, Blaise, 148; quoted, 70 Perfectionism, religious, disavowed by Edwards, 186 (n. 23) Perkins, William, 106 Perry, R. B., on Puritan doctrine of sin, 78; quoted, 84-85 Personalism (Buber), 58 Pietism, 143; Dutch, 144; dialectical, 184 (n. 46) Piety, decay of characteristic of Edwards' time, 4, 116-17 Platonism, Puritan, 168 (n. 47); see also Cambridge Platonists, Neoplatonism Plotinus, 168 (n. 46) Porter, Noah, quoted, 151 Positivism, 10, 117, 124 Preston, John, 106 Punishment, eternal, see Eternal punishment Puritanism, on evil, 84-85, 180 (n. 57); as philosophy, 104; early, 107-8; and mysticism, 142-45 Quakers, 105, 142, 190 (n. 68) Ramism, 105; introduced into Cambridge, 183 (n. 46) Ramsperger, A. G., quoted, 49

220 R a m u s , P e t e r , 168 (n. 47). 183 (n. 46) R a n d a l l , Giles, 144 Rationalism, 97 Realism, ontological, 29; classical, 166 (n. 30) Reason, 114-15, 124, 134-35, 15054 " R e f o r m e d Faith," 196 (n. 8) Regeneration, Mastricht on, 12122 Relativity theory, 43 Religion, Edwards on role of, 11515; and emotionalism. 140-42 Revelation, 97-98; as proof of God's existence, 16; Calvin on, 104, 108, I I I Roback, A. A., 68, 74-75 Rous, Francis, 144 Salvation, equated with social status, 5 Santayana, George, on evil, 80 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 62 Schelling, Friedrich, 103; a n d positive philosophy, 17 Schneider, Herbert, q u o t e d , 3; cited, 170 (n. 51) Semantics, as problem in theology, 108, 116-17, 159 Sibbes, Richard, quoted, 36, 121; influence of, on Edwards, 107; as Puritan mystic, 144 Sin, 65-89; consequences of, 71; see also Evil Skelton, Philip, 29 Slavery, sentiment against led by New England religious scholars, 162 Smith, J o h n , influence o n Edwards, 100; on Holy Spirit a n d divine immediacy, 107 Smith, J o h n E., compares Edwards to Kierkegaard, 118-19; cited, 141

INDEX

Space, analogous to God, 41-43 Spinoza. Baruch, 25; and determinism. 6K Sterrv. Peter. 144 Stewart, Randall, quoted, 2; cited, 5 Substance, materialistic concept of, 31; category of, 55-56 Taylor, J o h n , quoted, 48 Tennyson. Alfred, quoted, 127, 129 Theism, 6; fallacy, according to Hartshorne, 19; and relation of God to world, 20-21; abstract, 23; concrete, 23; dipolar (Hartshorne), 96 Theocracy, 184 (n. 46) Thermodynamics, second law of, 44; relativistic, 44 " T h i r d way" (Edwards), 1-11, 2 1 22 Tillich, Paul, quoted, 24-25, 29, 55, 80 T i n d a l , Matthew, 37, 109 T o l a n d , John, 38 Townsend, H. G., quoted, 54-55 T r u t h , oneness of, 152 T u r r c t i n , Francis, 106 Understanding, 114-15, 141. 15054, 153 Utilitarianism, 125 Vergil, quoted, 177 (n. 77) Watts, Alan \V„ quoted, 33, 65 Whitehead, Alfred North, and his p r o c e s s - p h i l o s o p h y , 9-10; o n beauty, 28; quoted 30, 90, 138, 153; on causality, 54; on God's relation to the world, 95; on nature of God, 98 Winslow, Ola, quoted, 4 Wollebius. J o h n , 106