The Enlightenment, Jonathan Edwards, and the Great Awakening
by Professor Allen C. Guelzo

The Enlightenment in Europe and in America sprawled across many questions, but at the end of the day, its fundamental question was about how we know things. Descartes could doubt the existence of everything except the operations of his own mind. But since the mind was capable of discovering and proving its own existence, that showed that the mind had an existence independent of matter. So, spiritual substances (minds) and material substances (bodies and objects) could coexist in the universe.

The best illustration of this coexistence was Isaac Newton's theory of gravity. Gravity was nothing if not the ideal way of showing how spirit-in this case, God-could operate on matter without needing to directly move it or alter it beyond the laws of physics. Just as the planets moved effortlessly through empty space in their unsupported orbits, so the entire universe could function just as effortlessly, without mechanism, directed from a discreet distance by the power of God.

Both Descartes and Newton opened up a way to have the New Philosophy and still have God. But it was clear that the God who emerged from their debates was no longer the God of the Bible or the God of the Reformation, but a God defined by what the natural order would allow them to say about spiritual substance. This may have satisfied Descartes and Newton, but not the broad spectrum of European opinion in the Enlightenment, which is why, in the midst of the Enlightenment, there occurred a remarkably and utterly unprecedented reawakening of the most intense and aggressive forms of evangelical Christianity. In Protestant Germany, it appeared in the form of what became known as Pietism; in France, it took on the form of Jansenism; in England, it appeared in both the writings and the lives of the Non-Jurors and in the Methodist revivals of John Wesley. But in all of them, the most intense and passionate Christian piety was reawakened across Europe in numbers and in force that made the Enlightenment seem shallow and inconsequential.

Even though a spiritual and intellectual gulf separated these awakenings from the Enlightenment, they did share some important common ground. In general, they had a common sense of weariness and skepticism about the usefulness and virtue of the established churches in Europe, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. They also shared the impulse to find a more authentic and natural kind of experience. The Enlightenment wanted to abandon Christianity almost entirely and uncover a more basic and authentic religion of nature. The awakeners did not abandon Christianity, but they sought to recover a more basic and authentic religion-not a religion of nature, but a religion of the heart, the true piety of primitive Christianity. The awakeners read the new science of the Enlightenment but used it to prove the impotence and limitations of the human reason before a universal system so vast and so incomprehensible. This was where Jonathan Edwards found himself.

Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, the son of Timothy Edwards, the pastor of the Congregational parish of East Windsor, Connecticut, and Esther Stoddard Edwards, whose father, Solomon Stoddard, was the pastor of the Congregational Church of Northampton, Massachusetts, and the most powerful ecclesiastical figure in western New England. From both sides of his family, Jonathan Edwards inherited a distrust of what was going on in Boston and Harvard.

In Boston, ministers and elders had begun asking for testimonies of grace before admitting people to membership. Stoddard, his grandfather, had decided as early as the 1660s that restricting church membership only to those who could make a public confession of receiving God's grace was a recipe for marginalizing the church's impact in society. Only a few in Northampton, Massachusetts, would ever come forward with a claim so staggering, Stoddard argued, and the rest would drift off to the sidelines of the church, where an opportunity to experience that grace might never happen. So, Stoddard not only threw down the barriers the first generation of New England Puritans had put in place, but threw even the Half-Way Covenant-which had been invented as a partial membership system-to the winds, and invited every member of the town to baptism and communion. As for Harvard, the churches and settlements of the Connecticut River Valley had long nursed suspicions about the weak theological knees that governed intellectual affairs in Cambridge, and that is why Connecticut Puritans finally decided on founding their own college in 1701, to be what Harvard had once been.

So the young Edwards, just shy of his 13th birthday, was sent to Yale, even though the infant college had not yet even worked out a permanent location. It finally settled at New Haven. Students were exposed to the English and Dutch Protestant Scholastics and William Brattle's Cartesian new logic, as well as the study of Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. Edwards applied himself to these innovations in the curriculum reluctantly, not because he lacked a taste for philosophy, but because he greatly preferred the older emphasis on logic, the art of discoursing well. Yet that did not prevent him from rising to the top of his class intellectually, and when he graduated from Yale, the choice for giving the valedictory oration fell to Edwards.

Despite his loyalties to the old logic, Edwards could not keep his curiosity from wandering to the New Philosophy. By the time he graduated, he had begun dabbling in two scientific essays, on insects and on spiders, and he began keeping commonplace books with his own speculations on epistemology and natural science.

Once out of Yale, he briefly served as pastor to a small congregation in New York City. But in June, 1724, he accepted an invitation from Yale to return as a tutor. He spent the next three years working out more deeply his explorations into epistemology, pursuing a clearer and more immediate view of God's exerting himself, with respect to spirits and mind. Edwards was gradually pulled to an immaterialism similar to that of Bishop Berkeley, in which that which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind.

There was, however, little professional future for junior tutors at Yale. In November, 1726, the Northampton church called Edwards to become his grandfather Stoddard's assistant pastor. Edwards was ordained by the Northampton church in February of 1727, and in 1729, after his grandfather Stoddard's death, Edwards succeeded him as pastor of the town, to the great annoyance of the enormous web of Edwards's Stoddard relations who all had sons of their own ready for the ministry. The notations in his philosophical notebooks trailed off as the demands of a busy pastorate washed over him. But from time to time, they surfaced again in Edwards's sermons, where it became clear that, for Edwards, immaterialism had become an effective weapon for the defense of traditional Calvinism.

Invited in 1731 to deliver the Boston Public Lecture, Edwards warned against the tendency of man "to exalt himself and depend on his own power or goodness," which was, of course, good Calvinist theology. The reasoning behind this smacked strongly of New Philosophical immaterialism: God acts in immaterialist fashion as "an extrinsic occasional agent" on the mind. Whatever ideas we have are the product, not of sensation, nor of the mind as a machine, but of the direct action of God. And echoing the European awakeners, Edwards was careful not to make this action simply a matter of God's presenting ideas directly to the mind and leaving the mind to do with them what it pleased-God's "action" works, not on the reason or "ratiocination," but on a "sense of the heart" which "immediately perceives" a beauty, "a divine, and transcendent, and most evidently distinguishing glory" in God. Edwards thus made immaterialist philosophy serve the interests of Calvinist piety.

The promotion of piety became Edwards's particular burden in the 1730s, especially when, in 1734, "a very remarkable blessing of heaven" fell on Northampton. In the Puritan past, the experience of religious conversion had been largely a matter of individual spiritual renewal, under the careful direction of pastors and family elders. The novelty introduced by the awakeners of the 18th century was to turn the experience of grace into a communal experience, a group revival of religion that could involve whole towns, sometimes entire regions. Solomon Stoddard, with his eye always on the improvement of his parish, had welcomed several small revivals like this in Northampton during his long pastorate there, and so had Edwards's father, Timothy, in their home parish in East Windsor. But this revival, which continued into 1735, saw "more than 300 souls ... savingly brought home to Christ in this town."

Not only the numbers, but the character of the revived was, Edwards said, "unprecedented." It involved not only males and females but children as young as four years, and outbursts of enthusiasm in worship. "Some," he said, "weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors." Edwards struggled both to defend and analyze this eruption in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, which was published in England in 1737. But he had hardly digested the lessons of the 1734-35 revival before a second wave of awakening came to Northampton in 1740, on the shoulders of the celebrated English preacher, George Whitefield.

Whitefield had emerged as one of the princes of the European awakeners, a preacher of fabulous talent, dramatic intensity, and superb self-confidence. In 1737, he dedicated himself to establishing an orphanage in the new American colony of Georgia, and undertook a fundraising preaching tour of the Colonies, which quickly turned into a riot of awakenings. What had been mere awakenings before now became a Great Awakening in British North America. When Whitefield came to Northampton to preach and to recognize Edwards as a fellow laborer, a fresh outbreak of revivals consumed not only Edwards's Northampton but much of western New England.

On the other hand, Whitefield's preaching also generated angry criticism, from both the Boston elite who spurned revivals as raw "enthusiasm," and from nervous country parsons who feared the destabilizing effect of mass revivals on the peace of their flocks. By 1742, the New England clergy had become polarized into an "Old Light" faction, who condemned the revivals, and a "New Light" faction who encouraged them, and who found in Edwards their principal theorist of revivals and religious experience.

Edwards not only participated fully as a preacher in promoting revivals, delivering in Enfield, Connecticut, his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," but he published three important defenses of New Light revivalism: Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God in 1741, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in 1742, and A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections in 1746. Of the three, The Religious Affections was Edwards's most profound effort, laying out in 12 signs, as he put it, the distinction between true and false religion, and the right place of the emotions, or "affections"-and he used the term "affections" to avoid the pejorative term "passions"-in religious experience.

Both Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion and The Religious Affections, however, betrayed signs of stress in Edwards. The aftermath of the Great Awakening in Northampton proved to be a severe disappointment to him, as many of the awakened gradually subsided into religious listlessness. In 1744, in an ill-considered effort to stimulate genuine conversions, Edwards reimposed the test of a public confession of grace on new members, which had been abandoned by Solomon Stoddard. The Northampton church, seething with resentment instead of repentance, turned on Edwards, and in 1750 he was forced to resign.

"Thrown upon the wide ocean of the world," as he put it, Edwards accepted the offer of the Boston Commissioners of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in New England to take charge of the Mohegan Indian mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 60 miles west of Northampton. He was an indifferent missionary, but the mission work gave him time to turn back to his philosophical notebooks, and between 1751 and 1757 he produced two manuscript "dissertations" on ontology and ethics. The first of them was "Concerning the End for which God Created the World," and the other, "On the Nature of True Virtue," these, plus two major treatises on "Freedom of the Will" in 1754, and "Original Sin" in 1758.

"Freedom of the Will" was the greatest piece of philosophical speculation penned by an American in the 18th century, and the only one that managed to command any serious European readership. But its real intent, as in so much of Edwards's work, was not to articulate philosophy or embrace the Enlightenment, but rather to justify, in the most enlightened vocabulary and method available, the ways of God to man.

Edwards had noticed how the threat of Thomas Hobbes's bleak materialism had frightened the daylights out of religious thinkers in the Enlightenment. Even among Calvinists, Hobbes's denial of free will had touched off a panicked flight into affirmations of human free will that flew straight in the face of Calvinism's teaching that God determined the outcome of all events. Edwards shut the door firmly on that flight. Calvinists, and for that matter, anyone who believed in a God who was more than just a well-intentioned bumbler-no one could run away from the fact that a God who was really God determined everything.

But Edwards's great achievement was to then turn and demonstrate, in one logical sweep after another, how God's determination of the will did not deprive anyone of freedom, much less force anyone over the cliff into materialism.

And it was logical sweep. Defenses of Calvinist theology before the Great Awakening had stiffened unimaginatively into the style and the rhetoric of the catechism, with certain theological axioms laid out, Scholastic style, and then adorned with scriptural proof texts, as if all that was needed to halt the Enlightenment's incoming tide was a potent Biblical quotation or two.

What has continuously surprised readers of Edwards's "Freedom of the Will" was how very unlike the catechism mode his writing was. In truth, "Freedom of the Will" reads as much like a treatise on psychology as an apologetic for Calvinism. But this was because the Enlightenment was simultaneously Jonathan Edwards's friend and enemy. His serene confidence in traditional Calvinism made him hostile to the Enlightenment's pretensions to base human behavior on reason and nature, and made him receptive to the notion that true spiritual harmony was possible only by overcoming the superficial allure of reason and nature.

Yet he believed just as firmly that reason, once it was sanctified by conversion of the heart, was an instrument to be well used in examining nature. Edwards's intellectual life was rooted in one of the Enlightenment's principal questions about epistemology. People who try to stand astride of conflicting intellectual movements, with one foot in one camp and one foot in another, or one foot in one answer and one foot in another answer, are usually torn to pieces by the conflict between the two. Edwards is that rare exception who instead turned the conflicts into a creative intellectual fusion, in this case, of Enlightenment and piety. In so doing, Edwards gave to Puritanism a new lease on intellectual life in the American mind and fashioned a new evangelical piety, a form that would become one of the two great, long-term forces in the history of American ideas.