determinate connexion between volition and motive which he asserts and the libertarians deny, moral agency would be impossible. Liberty, he holds, is simply freedom from constraint, “the power . . . that any one has to do as he pleases.” This power man possesses. And that the right or wrong of choice depends not on the cause of choice but on its nature, he illustrates by the example of Christ, whose acts were necessarily holy, yet truly virtuous, praiseworthy and rewardable. Even God Himself, Edwards here maintains, has no other liberty than this, to carry out without constraint His will, wisdom and inclination.
There is no necessary connexion between Edwards’s doctrine of the motivation of choice and the system of Calvinism with which it is congruent. Similar doctrines have more frequently perhaps been associated with theological scepticism. But for him the alternative was between Calvinism and Arminianism, simply because of the historical situation, and in the refutation of Arminianism on the assumptions common to both sides of the controversy, he must be considered completely successful. As a general argument his account of the determination of the will is defective, notably in his abstract conception of the will and in his inadequate, but suggestive, treatment of causation, in regard to which he anticipates in important respects the doctrine of Hume. Instead of making the motive to choice a factor within the concrete process of volition, he regards it as a cause antecedent to the exercise of a special mental faculty. Yet his conception of this faculty as functioning only in and through motive and character, inclination and desire, certainly carries us a long way beyond the abstraction in which his opponents stuck, that of a bare faculty without any assignable content. Modern psychology has strengthened the contention for a fixed connexion between motive and act by reference to subconscious and unconscious processes of which Edwards, who thought that nothing could affect the mind which was unperceived, little dreamed; at the same time, at least in some of its developments, especially in its freer use of genetic and organic conceptions, it has rendered much in the older forms of statement obsolete, and has given a new meaning to the idea of self-determination, which, as applied to an abstract power, Edwards rightly rejected as absurd.
Edwards’s controversy with the Arminians was continued in the essay on Original Sin, which was in the press at the time of his death. He here breaks with Augustine and the Westminster Confession by arguing, consistently with his theory of the Will, that Adam had no more freedom of will than we have, but had a special endowment, a supernatural gift of grace, which by rebellion against God was lost, and that this gift was withdrawn from his descendants, not because of any fictitious imputation of guilt, but because of their real participation in his guilt by actual identity with him in his transgression.
The Dissertation on the Nature of True Virtue, posthumously published, is justly regarded as one of the most original works on ethics of the 18th century, and is the more remarkable as reproducing, with no essential modification, ideas on the subject written in the author’s youth in the notes on the Mind. Virtue is conceived as the beauty of moral qualities. Now beauty, in Edwards’s view, always consists in a harmonious relation in the elements involved, an agreement of being with being. He conceives, therefore, of virtue, or moral beauty, as consisting in the cordial agreement or consent to intelligent being. He defines it as benevolence (good-will), or rather as a disposition to benevolence, towards being in general. This disposition, he argues, has no regard primarily to beauty in the object, nor is it primarily based on gratitude. Its first object is being, “simply considered,” and it is accordingly proportioned, other things being equal, to the object’s “degree of existence.” He admits, however, benevolent being as a second object, on the ground that such an object, having a like virtuous propensity, “is, as it were, enlarged, extends to, and in some sort comprehends being in general.” In brief, since God is the “being of beings” and comprehends, in the fullest extent, benevolent consent to being in general, true virtue consists essentially in a supreme love to God. Thus the principle of virtue—Edwards has nothing to say of “morality”—is identical with the principle of religion. From this standpoint Edwards combats every lower view. He will not admit that there is any evidence of true virtue in the approbation of virtue and hatred of vice, in the workings of conscience or in the exercises of the natural affections; he thinks that these may all spring from self-love and the association of ideas, from “instinct” or from a “moral sense of a secondary kind” entirely different from “a sense or relish of the essential beauty of true virtue.” Nor does he recognize the possibility of a natural development of true virtue out of the sentiments directed on the “private systems”; on the contrary, he sets the love of particular being, when not subordinated to being in general, in opposition to the latter and as equivalent to treating it with the greatest contempt. All that he allows is that the perception of natural beauty may, by its resemblance to the primary spiritual beauty, quicken the disposition to divine love in those who are already under the influence of a truly virtuous temper.
Closely connected with the essay on Virtue is the boldly speculative Dissertation on the End for which God Created the World. As, according to the doctrine of virtue, God’s virtue consists primarily in love to Himself, so His final end in creation is conceived to be, not as the Arminians held, the happiness of His creatures, but His own glory. Edwards supposes in the nature of God an original disposition to an “emanation” of His being, and it is the excellency of this divine being, particularly in the elect, which is, in his view, the final cause and motive of the world.
Edwards makes no attempt to reconcile the pantheistic element in his philosophy with the individuality implied in moral government. He seems to waver between the opinion that finite individuals have no independent being and the opinion that they have it in an infinitesimal degree; and the conception of “degrees of existence” in the essay on Virtue is not developed to elucidate the point. His theological conception of God, at any rate, was not abstractly pantheistic, in spite of the abstractness of his language about “being,” but frankly theistic and trinitarian. He held the doctrine of the trinitarian distinctions indeed to be a necessity of reason. His Essay on the Trinity, first printed in 1903, was long supposed to have been withheld from publication because of its containing Arian or Sabellian tendencies. It contains in fact nothing more questionable than an attempted deduction of the orthodox Nicene doctrine, unpalatable, however, to Edwards’s immediate disciples, who were too little speculative to appreciate his statement of the subordination of the “persons” in the divine “oeconomy,” and who openly derided the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son as “eternal nonsense”; and this perhaps was the original reason why the essay was not published.
Though so typically a scholar and abstract thinker on the one hand and on the other a mystic, Edwards is best known to the present generation as a preacher of hell fire. The particular reason for this seems to lie in a single sermon preached at Enfield, Connecticut, in July 1741 from the text, “Their foot shall slide in due time,” and commonly known from its title, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The occasion of this sermon is usually overlooked. It was preached to a congregation who were careless and loose in their lives at a time when “the neighbouring towns were in great distress for their souls.” A contemporary account of it says that in spite of Edwards’s academic style of preaching, the assembly was “deeply impressed and bowed down, with an awful conviction of their sin and danger. There was such a breathing of distress and weeping, that the preacher was obliged to speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard.” Edwards preached other sermons of this type, but this one was the most extreme. The style of the imprecatory sermon, however, was no more peculiar to him than to his period. He was not a great preacher in the ordinary meaning of the word. His gestures were scanty, his voice was not powerful, but he was desperately in earnest, and he held his audience whether his sermon contained a picturesque and detailed description of the torments of the damned, or, as was often the case, spoke of the love and peace of God in the heart of man. He was an earnest, devout Christian, and a man of blameless life. His insight into the spiritual life was profound. Certainly the most able metaphysician and the most influential religious thinker of America, he must rank in theology, dialectics, mysticism and philosophy with Calvin and Fénelon, Augustine and Aquinas, Spinoza and Novalis; with Berkeley and Hume as the great English philosophers of the 18th century; and with Hamilton and Franklin as the three American thinkers of the same century of more than provincial importance.
Edwards’s main aim had been to revivify Calvinism, modifying it for the needs of the time, and to promote a warm and vital Christian piety. The tendency of his successors was—to state the matter roughly—to take some one of his theories and develop it to an extreme. Of his immediate followers Joseph Bellamy is distinctly Edwardean in the keen logic and in the spirit of his True Religion Delineated, but he breaks with his master in his theory of general (not limited) atonement. Samuel Hopkins laid even greater stress than Edwards on the theorem that virtue consists in disinterested benevolence; but he went counter to Edwards in holding that unconditional resignation to God’s decrees, or more concretely, willingness to be damned for the glory of God, was the test of true regeneration; for Edwards, though often quoted as holding this doctrine, protested against it in the strongest terms. Hopkins, moreover, denied Edwards’s identity theory of original sin, saying that our sin was a result of Adam’s and not identical with it; and he went much further than Edwards in his objection to “means of grace,” claiming that the unregenerate were more and more guilty for continual rejection of the gospel if they were outwardly righteous and availed themselves of the means of grace. Stephen West (1735–1819), too, out-Edwardsed Edwards in his defence of the treatise on the Freedom of the Will, and John Smalley (1734–1820) developed the idea of a natural (not moral) inability on the part of man to obey God. Emmons, like Hopkins, considered both sin and holiness “exercises” of the will. Timothy Dwight (1752–1847) urged the use of the means of grace, thought Hopkins and Emmons pantheistic, and boldly disagreed with their theory of “exercises,” reckoning virtue and sin as the result of moral choice or disposition, a position that was also upheld by Asa Burton (1752–1836), who thought that on regeneration the disposition of man got a new relish or “taste.”
Jonathan Edwards[1] the younger (1745–1801), second son of
- ↑ Besides the younger Jonathan many of Edwards’s descendants
