epidemic broke out. Mather's stance brought bitter popular opposition.
∏∫ The Harmony of All Knowledge
natural science, one can easily lose sight of this practical side. Persons who met him did not find someone whose head was only in the clouds, but rather someone who, despite his preoccupation with the spiritual meaning of things, knew many practical things about nature and mechanics. Like many eighteenth-century philosophers, Edwards was a polymath interested in all knowledge and fascinated by how things worked.
New England clergy, being the best educated persons in their communities, were often the chief interpreters of the new science. Jonathan knew well and apparently admired Cotton Mather's daring stance in urging inoculations during a devastating smallpox epidemic in Boston during 1721 and 1722. Probably at least one of Jonathan's sisters was studying there when the epidemic broke out. Mather's stance brought bitter popular opposition. Someone even attempted to bomb his house. James Franklin, who could not resist opposing whatever Mather proposed, attacked inoculation in his irreverent New England Courant as a way to fan anticlerical sentiments.≤∏
Although science and religion among New England's clergy were firm allies, the characteristic ways of relating God's providential control to his laws of nature had subtly changed. As early as 1683 Increase Mather, almost an exact contemporary of Isaac Newton, helped found the Boston Philosophical Society, patterned after the Royal Society of London.≤π His precocious son Cotton, who was twenty in 1683, soon surpassed his father as a transmitter of the new science to the colonies, and eventually the Royal Society itself honored him with membership. Cotton Mather, however, came of age in a world di√erent from that which young Edwards would find. New Englanders of the 1680s still lived in ''an enchanted universe'' filled with ghosts, devils, witches, and the preternatural, where one expected to see signs from God and wonders from a vast invisible world.≤∫ Increase Mather, in good scientific fashion, collected and republished accounts of preternatural providences, of people struck dead for disobeying God, of pacts with the devil, witchcraft, monstrous births, even a man who stole sheep and then had a sheep's horn grow out of his mouth. New England was hardly di√erent from England in such beliefs. Even the pages of the Transactions of the Royal Society in these early days were a mix of the scientific and the preternatural.≤Ω
In the 1690s Cotton Mather paid dearly for attempting to preserve the preternatural as an area for scientific inquiry when he defended ''The Wonders of the Invisible World'' at the height of the Salem witchcraft convulsions. The hysteria and miscarriage of justice, even by the standards of the time, eventually led the Mathers to help bring the prosecutions to a halt. The fiasco
The Harmony of All Knowledge ∏Ω
also chastened clerical attempts to identify specific demonic powers in the succeeding years. By Edwards' time witchcraft and the preternatural had almost disappeared from clerical attention. In 1690 Cotton Mather could preach about a prodigious cabbage root he had seen that had one branch shaped like a cutlass, another like a rapier, and another like an Indian club, and pronounce that this was a special providential warning to New England. By the next generation such interpretations of prodigies would be a bit of an embarrassment.
Still, the educated of the early eighteenth century did not abandon their firm belief that God held New England and everything else in his providential care and that he might arrange nature to provide signs of how he was guiding history. One could still read providential signs, such as comets, earthquakes, natural disasters, or sudden deaths, as the Bible said one should, as warnings and judgments on specific sins. Typical of the mentality was a pamphlet published in 1719 by Mather's fellow evangelical preacher Thomas Prince on a wonderful aurora borealis he had seen in England three years earlier. Although the cosmic display was so spectacular that Prince briefly reconsidered his disposition not to look for prodigies, his considered view was that it was explainable both in terms of natural causes and as a divine sign, probably to remind people of the last judgment. His account, he noted, had received the imprimatur of the renowned observer of comets, Edmund Halley.≥≠
This was the philosophical world in which young Edwards came of age. Thomas Prince became one of his closest friends. Edwards' attitudes on the dual character of natural phenomena were typical of the orthodox clergy of his generation. He was as eager as anyone to find God's hand in history or nature, but he also expected God to work through secondary, or natural, causes. While he often spoke of Satan as a personal agent, he almost never mentioned witches. This silence, characteristic of his generation, suggests their embarrassment over their immediate predecessors' overreading of the wonders of the invisible world.
Edwards was also cautious about reading everyday successes or failures as precise messages from God. Early in his diary, in January 1723, reflecting on a time of spiritual dullness, he wrote: ''I find also by experience, that there is no guessing out the ends of providence, in particular dispensations towards me.'' He recognized that in a general way ''a∆ictions come as corrections for sin'' and should remind one to repent of ''all our sin.'' Further, one should be reminded ''that all things shall work together for our good; not knowing in what way, indeed, but trusting in God.''≥∞
π≠ The Harmony of All Knowledge
Although New England clergy successfully made the transition from the Aristotelian to Newtonian views of nature, the new science had implications for understanding the nature of God's providential care. During the long era when Aristotelian physics held sway, divine or demonic interventions created no theoretical problem. Aristotelians assumed that physical objects were naturally at rest and that motion was an acquired quality. So motion could be explained by the intervention of a personal mover, such as a spiritual being, without any disruption of the system of physical laws. Newtonians, by contrast, viewed the physical universe as a constantly moving system of interlocking mechanisms. If everything was in motion and exercised a gravitational pull on everything else, then one could not alter one part in the process without influencing the rest. As a teenage student Edwards recognized this problem and never turned away from its amazing implications. One of his early ''Things to Be Considered and Written Fully About'' was ''To shew how the motion, rest and direction of the least atom has an influence on the motion, rest and direction of every body in the universe.'' That meant that ''the least wrong step in a mote, may, in eternity, subvert the order of the universe.'' So one should ''take notice of the great wisdom that is necessary in order thus to dispose every atom at first, as that they should go for the best throughout all eternity; and in the adjusting by an exact computation, and a nice allowance to be made for the miracles which should be needful.'' The vast computations necessary for all this testified to the necessity that God ''be omniscient'' and wise beyond our imaginings.≥≤
A God of this magnitude, one who created and governed such an immense universe, could, of course, easily plan for miracles and arrange for any number of coincidences that would have special providential meanings. Nothing in the new conception of an automated mechanical universe necessitated a diminishing of God's immediate involvement. God saw every sequence of cause and e√ect from the vantage point of eternity. He saw beginning and end simultaneously. Yet he also governed the universe through an amazing system of sequential natural laws within which he could, as easily as not, make occasional prearranged adjustments for miracles.
The basis for this reconciliation of God's care with a largely automated universe was nothing new. Greek and medieval thinkers had long made distinctions among complementary levels of causation. God could be the ultimate cause of everything and could use the secondary causes, seen in natural laws, to bring about anything he wanted. Almost all thinkers of the new scientific age made this ancient distinction. They could a≈rm both that God
The Harmony of All Knowledge π∞
governed everything and that he did so through a vast system of secondary causes, or natural laws.
Yet for many who had accepted the world of Newton's mechanics and of a God who worked through secondary causes, God's personal interventions could easily seem superfluous. Some of the best thinkers advocated ''rational religion'' and Deism, which made just this point. In England, John Toland, a disciple of Locke, led the way in popularizing such views in his Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). God, said Toland and a number of other influential deistic writers, was an all-wise Creator who established universal natural laws and universal moral laws for free creatures. According to reason, such a God would be wise enough to design a universe of laws that operated on its own, so that he would not have to intervene personally to make miraculous adjustments.≥≥
The deists are sometimes almost equated with eighteenth-century enlightened thought, but it is often forgotten how many other renowned thinkers, especially at the dawn of that century, were resisting this dismissal of God's intimate involvement with the physical world. The most prominent was Isaac Newton himself. Newton was a pious, if unorthodox, Anglican with deep theological interests and an expert knowledge of the Bible. At one point before he published Principia (1687), he put aside his work in physics because he was more fascinated with his studies in theology and biblical prophecy. Though he questioned the Nicene formula on the Trinity, he did so on the basis of his study of Scripture, and he kept his heterodoxy largely to himself. Throughout his career he kept notebooks on prophecies, typologies, church history, and related topics, devoting himself particularly to deciphering the meanings of mysterious biblical prophecies.
In Newton's own Newtonian universe there was plenty of room for God not just as creator, but as sustainer of physical reality. Early in his career he became particularly alarmed by what he saw as an absurd dualism in Descartes' philosophy that separated matter from spirit and thus, in Newton's view, could lead to an atheism in which matter operated independently of God.≥∂ Newton's conception of gravity kept God immediately in the picture. Since gravity was simply a property of all matter, without any mechanical explanation, Newton attributed it to the will and action of God the creator and sustainer of matter. What was matter after all but a place in the universe that God had infused with certain powers, such as the power of resistance to other matter trying to pass through it and the power of attraction to other matter even at a distance?≥∑ In Opticks Newton asked, ''does it not appear from
π≤ The Harmony of All Knowledge
phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory [sense organs], sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself.''≥∏
Newton had derived much of his philosophy from the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87), who became his elder colleague and friend at Cambridge University. More preceded Newton in his adamant opposition to what they saw as the materialism inherent in Descartes' dualism. As a NeoPlatonist, More insisted that the universe was a single, basically spiritual, reality. He insisted that God was intimately involved with all beings since only through God's action could anything possess the powers that defined it as being.≥π
For New Englanders, Henry More provided a bridge to Newton. Cambridge had been a Puritan stronghold, and even though the Cambridge Platonists put more emphasis on reason as an independent source of religious knowledge than did the stricter Calvinists, More became well known at Harvard before the end of the century. New Englanders, who were schooled in pagan classics, were used to appropriating authors selectively, and they could read More critically, yet with much appreciation. More was so influential because Platonic traditions that emphasized physical reality as a copy or shadow of a purer spiritual reality existing in the mind of God had always had a prominent place in New England thought.≥∫ So it was not unusual that Edwards had read More by his senior year at Yale or that More's ideas should be evident in his appropriation of the new science.≥Ω
The Universe as God's Language
Far from being the frontier boy who, after reading a few works, spun out a whole new conception of Western thought, Edwards could have gleaned his basic views from any number of sources. Indeed, although he displayed originality and genius as he worked out his own exact formulations, his fundamental outlook was strikingly akin to that of a group of late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century thinkers who have been characterized as ''theocentric metaphysicians.''∂≠ When Edwards was coming of age, for instance, one prototypical philosopher was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a German ecumenical Christian who rivaled Newton in the discovery of calculus and was renowned for a theory of God's constant action in the universe and for his Theodicy (1710) justifying God's ways in maintaining the best of
The Harmony of All Knowledge π≥
possible worlds. Leibniz does not seem to have influenced Edwards directly, but their ideas bore resemblances because they were working in the same field of discourse. Edwards' thought also has some similarities to the views of Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715), a French Augustinian Catholic philosopher and theologian who held that things are really God's ideas and that the unity of the soul with God is the proper source of knowledge.∂∞
Interpreters of Edwards have long noticed parallels between his philosophical idealism and aspects of that of Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753). Berkeley, an Irish Anglican, argued that Locke's empiricism would lead to skepticism if some things had essentially material existence, yet we knew them only as ideas in our minds. Things truly exist, he countered, as ideas in God's mind. Berkeley had published his views by 1710, but Edwards seems not to have read him directly before the mid-1720s, after his own philosophy was well in place.∂≤ Berkeley ministered in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1729 to 1731 and became a benefactor to Yale College; Edwards may have even met Berkeley on a trip to Newport in 1731.∂≥ Edwards appropriated some of Berkeley's views once he read them, but their similarities grew mainly from their common concerns with the most demanding philosophical and theological questions of the era.
The young Edwards was aligning himself with some formidable philosophers who were taking a stand against those who would draw a line between the material and the spiritual and thus distance God from a direct role in creation. Not only Cartesians but many Newtonians, despite Newton himself, were moving in this dualistic direction. The countermovement asserted that the new science was fully compatible with God's most intimate involvement with every moment of existence. Not only could they point, as everyone else did, to the marvels of the intelligent design of this immense creation, but they were attempting to show why it was logically necessary that God's immediate power must sustain creation even in its most minute detail.
When Edwards began his notebook on these topics while still a graduate student at Yale, his main concern was to head o√ the materialist philosophies that the scientific revolution might invite. The most direct advocate of such views was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the enfant terrible of seventeenthcentury English philosophy, who unlike his more pious contemporaries, suggested what later became a triumphant modern view, that material being is the essence of reality. Edwards, who had not studied Hobbes directly, nonetheless recorded a reminder for the book he was planning ''to bring in an observation somewhere in a proper place, that instead of Hobbes' notion that
π∂ The Harmony of All Knowledge
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.''∂∂
This comment was related to other themes he was developing concerning the basic nature of created reality. Following a suggestion of Newton,∂∑ Edwards argued in a very early set of entries concerning atoms, that the essence of these smallest particles must be their indivisibility, that is, they cannot be made any smaller. This resistance to division must be, in turn, the essence of solidity. So solidity did not have to do most basically with taking up a certain amount of space (''extension'' the Cartesians called it), but was rather essentially a power, the power of resistance. This power must, of course, arise ultimately from God, the Creator. A corollary was, ''We by this also clearly see that creation of the corporeal universe is nothing but the first causing resistance in such parts of space as God thought fit.''∂∏
Creation was thus not something that happened just long ago, it also was ongoing. ''The first creation,'' he wrote, is ''only the first exertion of this power to cause such resistance.'' God must continue to preserve these powers or the universe would cease to be. ''The universe is created out of nothing every moment,'' said Edwards, ''and if it were not for our imaginations, which hinder us, we might see that wonderful work performed continually.''∂π So this ''power of being [is] communicated successively from one part of space to another, according to such stated conditions as his infinite wisdom directed.'' In other words, as he put it in the next corollary, God's ongoing creative power was communicated by ''that we call the laws of nature in bodies, to wit: the stated methods of God's acting with respect to bodies.''∂∫
Gravity, for instance, was not something for which one should expect to find a mechanical cause; it was an inherent quality or power of solidity. It was a power closely related to the power of resistance, and these two powers determined the harmonious relations of bodies to each other. Although gravity operated according to predictable laws, it was no less the direct action of God. So Edwards, reflecting the opinion of Newton and many popular scientific writers of his day, asserted, ''it is universally allowed that gravity depends immediately on the divine influence.'' It followed then, that ''if gravity should be withdrawn, the whole universe would in a moment vanish into nothing.''∂Ω
By summer 1723, when Edwards had returned home from New York and resumed work on his scientific notebooks, he had developed much more radical implications of these ideas. His thinking up to that time had not strayed far from the Lockean and Newtonian principles found in the contemporary scientific literature. That summer, however, he extended this line of
The Harmony of All Knowledge π∑
thought to a momentous conclusion that some other philosophers of the era had also reached, that ''nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness.'' To prove this startling point he suggested that we think of ''another universe only of bodies, created at a great distance from this.'' Only God would know its wondrous motions and spectacular beauties because this universe contained no other intelligence. So where else, he asked, do these beauties and relationships of motions exist other than in the divine consciousness? Suppose the divine consciousness were also removed for a moment. Then, said Edwards, that universe would cease to be, not only because God would not be maintaining it, but because God knew nothing of it. This might be counterintuitive, but Edwards stated confidently that ''this will appear to be truly so to anyone that thinks of it with the whole united strength of his mind.''
To illustrate this di≈cult point, he asked his supposed reader to imagine that the world were deprived of light. In that case all color would cease to exist. The color green did not abide in the leaf but existed only when there was both light and someone to perceive those reflected rays as green. This was a fairly conventional point of the day, but it pushed Edwards to his more radical implication. The solidity of bodies was the same sort of thing as colors, something that did not exist in itself but only as a power that could be perceived under certain conditions. If bodies were essentially the power of resistance to other bodies, then suppose the universe were deprived of motion. Then that power would never truly exist because it was something that could not be experienced any more than color could be experienced in a world without light. So then:
Put both these suppositions together, that is, deprive the world of light and motion, and the case would stand thus with the world: There would be neither white nor black, neither blue nor brown, bright nor shaded, sellucid nor opaque; no noise or sound, neither heat nor cold, neither fluid nor wet nor dry, hard nor soft, nor solidity, nor extension, nor figure, nor magnitude, nor proportion; nor body, nor spirit. What then is become of the universe? Certainly, it exists nowhere but in the divine mind. This will be abundantly clearer to one after having read what I have further to say of solidity, etc. [i.e, that solidity is resistance]. So that we see that a world without motion can exist nowhere else but in the mind, either infinite or finite.
From this it followed, as he immediately added, ''that those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substan-
π∏ The Harmony of All Knowledge
tial beings, in as much as the being of other things is only by these.'' So, he concluded triumphantly, materialism is defeated: ''From hence we may see the gross mistake of those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow; whereas spirits only are properly substance.''∑≠
This point may seem hard to grasp and will remain particularly elusive unless one recognizes that Edwards was developing his physics and his metaphysics in relation to the central component of his thought, his theology. He was not, like Locke, trying to build a philosophy from the ground up, starting with human experience. Nor was he, like Descartes, trying to deduce a universe by starting with the dictates of human reason. Rather he was developing his thought in rigorous Calvinist fashion, from the top down, starting with an absolutely sovereign triune Creator who was in control of all things. The universe was a universe of relationships and the ultimate relationship was always to the Creator.
Everything in his religious training and in the Calvinist theologians, whom he studied as assiduously as he studied Locke or Newton, disposed him to think in this holistic way. The ''old logic'' of Ramism was built around this principle of a universe of relationships in which everything had its place. This outlook had set his habits of thought since he was a child, and as an adult he never departed from its essentials.∑∞ Edwards, like his New England predecessors, imbibed this comprehensive view of things from William Ames' Technometria (1631), a Ramist handbook ''which adequately circumscribes the boundaries and the ends of all the arts and of every individual art.''∑≤ Ultimately, everything existed as archetypes in the divine mind. Humans see only the signs and shadows of this perfect reality.∑≥
Ramism, of which much has been made regarding seventeenth-century New England thought, was only one tool in the service of much larger ideal of establishing an ''encylopedia'' or, literally, a ''circle of learning.'' Edwards inherited this ideal from the impressive world of seventeenth-century international Reformed or Calvinist thinkers, which shaped him as much as did purely British writers. A standard work in New England libraries, for instance, was John Alsted's Encyclopedia Scientiarum Omnium (1630), which was a compendium of nothing less than, as its title said, ''the circle of all knowledge.'' All things in God's universe were related, and the goal of learning was to recognize the circle of relationships. If one started from the right premises, drawn from Scripture, reason, and observation, one could be confident in the ability to discover the order of reality because it was a manifestation of the
The Harmony of All Knowledge ππ
perfect patterns in the divine mind. Though Edwards' version of the ideal was shaped by Reformed sources, variations on the encylopedic idea were commonplace in European thought.∑∂
What Edwards took from this tradition, following his Calvinist and Augustinian predecessors, was not a static Platonic idealism in which the material world was a copy of fixed ideals that existed in an ultimate Mind. Rather, his universe most essentially consisted of persons and relationships. The Creator was a personal acting God. God in this tradition was a trinity, a social being of interrelated persons. The doctrine of the trinity, which set Christianity apart from abstract Greek and Deist theism, was a subject of extraordinary interest to Edwards. In his ''Miscellanies'' notebooks, he constantly returned to this theme. The very end for which this supremely social being created the universe was, as he wrote in an early entry, ''the communication of happiness'' to his creatures.∑∑
If the universe is most essentially intended for the communication of God's love, beauty, and happiness to his creatures, Edwards believed, then it also makes sense to view physical objects as existing most essentially in minds rather than as independent material objects. Physical creation is a communication of God's love and beauty, but love and beauty require persons to share or appreciate them. With the eyes to see reality as it truly is one can see in nature types of the highest expression of the beauty of divine love, the sacrifice of Christ for the undeserving.
Typology, long a staple of Christian thought, was central to Edwards' conception of the universe. God had created lower things to be signs that poined to higher spiritual realities. The universe, then, was a complex language of God. Nothing in it was accidental. Everything pointed to higher meaning. Scripture, which itself was filled with types, was the key to reading the true meaning of everything else. The types in Scripture (for example, Joshua leading the people of Israel into the promised land) all pointed ultimately to the redemptive work of Christ. Nature needed to be interpreted as containing this same message. Everything was a symbol pointing either to the need for redemption or to some aspect of God's character and the redemptive love in Christ.
Jonathan's contemplative joys were of a piece with his philosophy and theology. His ine√able experiences as he walked alone in the fields were of the beauties of God's love communicated in nature. That created world was the very language of God. As Psalm 19 said, ''The heavens declare the glory of God.'' The beauty of nature proclaimed the beauty and love of Christ. In-
π∫ The Harmony of All Knowledge
deed, in creation, as the Lord declared to Job, ''the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy'' (Job 38:7). Enraptured by the beauties of God's ongoing creation, Jonathan recorded, ''it was always my manner, at such times, to sing forth my contemplations.''∑∏
By fall 1723 Edwards was developing this sense of beauty into a creative line of thought that he believed might become the basis for a great masterwork. He started a new notebook, designed to be the basis for a treatise on ''The Mind,'' or ''The Natural History of the Mental World, or of the Internal World,'' and began with the subject of ''excellency.'' Drawing on his Platonic and Augustinian heritage and current theories of beauty, he reflected on why some things appear more beautiful or excellent to us than do others.∑π
In contrast to the later notion that ''beauty is in the eye of the beholder,'' he took for granted that beauty originated from God who communicated various degrees of ''excellency'' in creation. Edwards' question was: ''Wherein is one thing excellent and another evil, one beautiful and another deformed?'' Thus equating excellency, beauty, and good, he concluded that these qualities had to do with right proportions. Things were excellent if they stood in proper relation to each other. This was illustrated not only by the simple harmonies of symmetrical proportions, but also in exceedingly complex harmonious relationships. For example, ''That sort of beauty which is called 'natural,' as of vines, plants, trees, etc., consists of a very complicated harmony; and all the natural motions and tendencies and figures of bodies in the universe are done according to proportion, and therein is their beauty. Particular disproportions sometimes greatly add to the general beauty, and must necessarily be, in order to a more universal proportion.''
So beauty or excellency consisted in right relationships to the whole picture, ultimately to the whole of being. All of reality was, as commonly held, a great chain of being. God, the essence of being, was perfectly spiritual and had created a hierarchy of other beings—angels, humans, animals, plants, inanimate things, and so on—with varying capacities to glorify God. Excellency, as Edwards defined it, was ''the consent of being to being. . . . The more the consent is, and the more extensive, the greater is the excellency.''∑∫
''Consent of being to being'' was the essence of love and hence of excellency and beauty. ''One of the highest excellencies is love,'' Edwards wrote. ''As nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and as bodies are but the shadow of being, therefore, the consent of bodies to one another, and the harmony that is among them, is but the shadow of excellency. The highest excellency, therefore, must be the consent of spirits one to another.''
The Harmony of All Knowledge πΩ
Physical beauties, whether in nature, human bodies, or the like, could be wonderfully good insofar as they were properly related to higher spiritual realities. On the other hand, physical relationships that were controlled only by the fleeting pleasures derived from limited lower parts of being could be ''odious'' because they often involved a ''deformity,'' out of proper relation to the whole.
Perhaps the most helpful analogy for understanding Edwards' view of excellency and beauty is to music. One of his favorite terms was ''harmony,'' which he often used as synonymous with ''proportion.'' Reflecting eighteenthcentury views of music, he considered how musical harmonies are inherent in various proper relationships of notes to each other. Extending this thought, he wrote: ''Spiritual harmonies are of vastly larger extent; i.e., the proportions are vastly oftener redoubled, and respect more beings, and require a vastly larger view to comprehend them, as some simple notes do more a√ect one who has not a comprehensive understanding of music.''∑Ω
To fully appreciate this analogy one should recall that Edwards was writing at the time when J. S. Bach (1685–1750) was at the height of his creative powers. In 1723 Bach had just arrived in Leipzig to assume his post as cantor and music director and was in the midst of putting together the first of his astonishing cycles of cantatas to be performed in the city's churches. Though Bach was Lutheran and German, he and Edwards were working in similar worlds of discourse where ine√able beauties that pointed to the divine were found in the harmonies of complex relationships. Bach had a keen sense of the fervent a√ective meanings of biblical texts. Perhaps the best-known example from this period is the St. John Passion, performed during Easter season 1724.∏≠ While Edwards probably never heard the works of Bach, he had heard other eighteenth-century music and knew enough about it to understand how complex harmonies, both challenging to the intellect and overwhelming to the a√ections, could point toward the divine.
Edwards' integration of his experiences of the sublime with his theology and the latest natural philosophy meant that he was strenuously resisting any desacralization of the New England worldview. Even though he took for granted a certain kind of disenchantment of the world since the days of preternatural powers, he was reasserting the immediate presence of God in everything. Rather than allowing the Newtonian universe to lead to a distancing of God from creation, Edwards insisted that the recently discovered immensities and complexities of the universe confirmed God's ongoing intimate expressions of his art and language in all that had being.
∫≠ The Harmony of All Knowledge
Edwards realized that his underlying metaphysics, that things existed essentially only in consciousness, was di≈cult for most people to grasp. One of his diary entries as a young preacher was ''Remember to act according to Prov. 12:23, 'A prudent man concealeth knowledge.' ''∏∞ While he continued to plan major treatises built on his profound insights, he did not yet venture to unveil his philosophy in public, let alone in preaching. He recognized that in everyday life, as in natural science, people can appropriately talk about things in the commonsense terms of their appearances. ''Though we suppose that the existence of the whole material universe is absolutely dependent on idea,'' he observed, ''yet we may speak in the old way, and as properly and truly as ever.''∏≤
In Edwards' view it would have been entirely beside the point to try to refute his idealism as the English Samuel Johnson was supposed to have attempted to answer George Berkeley's immaterialism by kicking a rock. The very starting point of Edwards' explanation was that God endowed rocks with the power of resistance, so that we will have the painful experience of such resistance if we try to kick one. Commonsense ways of analyzing physical realities—even if limited—would work perfectly well.
The problem with thinking that commonsense experience was ultimate, he was convinced, was a failure of imagination. At the very beginning of his notes for his projected work on natural science he wrote, ''Of the Prejudices of Imagination.'' He subtitled this, ''Lemma to the whole,'' meaning it would be a recurring theme or refrain. ''Imagination'' at the time meant literally the faculty by which one forms images of things. The source of prejudices, said Edwards, was that people get so used to perceiving things in common ways that they ''make what they can actually perceive by their senses, or by immediate and outside reflection into their own souls, the standard of possibility or impossibility; so that there must be no body, forsooth, bigger than they can conceive of, or less than they can see with their eyes; nor motion either much swifter or slower than they can imagine.'' So, for instance, ''some men will yet say they cannot conceive how the fixed stars can be so distant as that the earth's annual revolution should cause no parallax among them, and so are almost ready to fall back into antiquated Ptolemy, his system, merely to ease their imagination.''∏≥
In his diary in September 1723 he resolved never to close his mind to new scientific discoveries: ''I observe that old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries, because they are beside a way of thinking, they have been so long used to. Resolved, if ever I live to years, that I will be impartial to hear
The Harmony of All Knowledge ∫∞
the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them if rational, how long so ever I have been used to another way of thinking.''∏∂
Prejudices of the imagination were not confined to the old or the unlettered. A ''very learned man and sagacious astronomer,'' whom Edwards had read, supposed the universe must be infinite because it was so immensely large. The astronomer had let the limits of his imagination get the best of him. ''Suppose he had discovered the visible world, so vast as it is, to be a globule of water to another,'' Edwards retorted in his notebook, ''the case is the same.'' Just because one can not imagine how large something is does not imply that it is infinite.∏∑
People who limited their sensibilities to what they base on their sense experience were condemned to a shortsighted view of things. Reason needed to correct mere experience. That was what the Copernican revolution had taught. Humans had not been able to conceive of the earth as in motion because all observation confirmed it was at rest. Once people got beyond their crude images of things and examined them by reason as well as observation, they discovered a universe far beyond their imaginations.
Edwards believed that he could develop a unified account of all knowledge, but it could not be discovered by experience and reason alone. God might speak in all of nature and in all of life, but the only place where one could find the key to unlock the whole system was in Scripture. All knowledge must begin there. Scripture was not just a source of information but the necessary guide to a radical life-changing perspective. As every New England child was taught: ''The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge'' (Proverbs 1:7). The starting point for unraveling the mysteries of the universe must be the shattering revelation of one's total inadequacy and a recognition of God's love in Jesus Christ. One who was so changed could then experience how all creation was one harmonious hymn of praise to the glories of the Creator and the mercies of Christ. Without the grace that gave sinful and rebellious people ears to hear, they would never hear the sublime Christ-like choruses or see how the particular notes of reality all fit together.
C H A P T E R ∑ kl
Anxieties
s the summer of 1723 wore into its dog days and Jonathan continued to be absorbed at his East Windsor home in his many spiritual and intellectual projects, he was becoming anxious. On three occasions in late summer he confided to his diary his worries about failure. ''With respect to the important business which I have now on hand,'' he wrote in the most explicit entry, ''resolved, to do whatever I think to be duty, prudence and diligence in the matter, and to avoid ostentation; and if I succeed not, and how many disappointments soever I meet with, to be entirely easy; only to take occasion to acknowledge my unworthiness; and if it should actually not succeed, and should not find acceptance, as I expected, yet not to a∆ict myself about it, according to the 57th Resolution.'' Resolution 57 reads, ''Resolved, when I fear misfortunes and adversities, to examine whether I have done my duty, and resolve to do it; and let it be just as providence orders it, I will as far as I can, be concerned about nothing but my duty and my sin.'' Rather than fear failure or let it gnaw away at him, he must learn simply to accept God's providence.∞
The ''important business'' appears to have been the M.A. oration he was to deliver at the Yale commencement on September 20. We might wonder why so superb a student should feel so much anxiety over success, failure, or even rejection. M.A. students needed only to study on their own for three years and then present a Latin defense of a thesis. This oration, called a Quaestio, took the medieval form of a syllogistic disputation in defense of a proposition. Disputations were the most engaging part of the college curriculum, and no one could have surpassed the relentlessly logical young Edwards in this syllogistic form. He had been honored at the commencement three years earlier by being asked to deliver the Latin valedictory oration, a privilege
Anxieties ∫≥
usually reserved for M.A. candidates.≤ So why the anxiety? Why the fears of possible ''disappointments''? He was not going to be denied his degree. Something else rested on this. A future Yale tutorship? A church in the New Haven vicinity? In any case he seemed to have seen his public acceptance as a crucial matter.
''Commencement Quarter Days'' were major public occasions marking the end of summer.≥ In a society that, in reaction to Catholic and Anglican traditions, had rid itself of religious holidays excepting the rigorous Sabbath, Commencement Day was a time for the colony to gather in celebration. For the common people it was like a market day in the normally placid village, a day when New Haven, once the capital of its own colony, came into its own. For the educated, the commencement was also serious business, involving a full day of Latin theses presentations, examination of candidates, and ceremonies. The college published the theses in advance, and even in ordinary times educated men all over New England took note of the propositions to be defended.∂
The commencement of 1723 was no ordinary time, and the people who mattered would be hanging on every word. The colony was still reeling from the aftershocks of the words everyone had heard at commencement the previous year. On that occasion, the Reverend Timothy Cutler, the impressive rector, had closed the ceremonies with a prayer that ended with the shocking phrase: ''and let all the people say, amen.''
This information resounded as though lightning had struck the podium. Some of the crowd might not have been surprised if lightning had struck the rector. It was as though, in a later era, at an NAACP rally, the president had unfurled a Confederate flag, or the commencement preacher at Bob Jones University had closed with a prayer to the Blessed Virgin. Cutler's words were straight out of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. They were a signal that the very man chosen to be the chief guardian of New England orthodoxy had declared himself in the camp of the enemy.
This great ''apostasy,'' as it became known, was recognized immediately. Storm clouds had been building and tension already filled the atmosphere. Anglicanism had been technically legal for decades in Connecticut, but no Anglican priest had successfully established a mission in the colony. Cosmopolitan Boston had learned to live with an Anglican presence, but every Connecticut town had resisted this Puritan nemesis. Strenuous e√orts by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (the missionary wing of the Church of England) to plant churches in Connecticut found only stony soil.