Approaching Jonathan Edwards

The Evolution of a Persona

Carol Ball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472447029
• eBook ISBN: 9781317179979
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Exploring the inner motivations of one of America's greatest religious thinkers, this book analyses the ways in which Jonathan Edwards' intense personal piety and deep experience of divine sovereignty drove an introverted intellectual along a course that would eventually develop into a mature and respected public intellectual. Throughout his life, the tension between his innately contemplative nature and the active demands of public office was a constant source of internal and public strife for Edwards. Approaching Jonathan Edwards offers a new theoretical approach to the study of Edwards, with an emphasis on his writing activity as the key strategy in shaping his legacy. Tracing Edwards' strategic self-fashioning of his persona through the many conflicts in which he was engaged, the critical turning points in his life, and his strategies for managing conflicts and crises, Carol Ball concludes that Edwards found his place as a superlative contemplative apologist and theorist of experiential spirituality.

Chapter 1
The Elusive Jonathan Edwards

Getting to Know Edwards

Jonathan Edwards was a person of immense personal integrity, piety and faith, regarded by many as the greatest theologian, pastor, preacher, philosopher and literary artist that America has ever produced. Churchmen and academics alike are nonplussed by the fact that a man of Jonathan Edwards’s stature could be fired by his parishioners. Perhaps this anomaly can be explained in part by the conclusions drawn at the 2003 birthday celebrations for Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), where it was suggested that despite the enormous volume of writing on Edwards, we still may not know him very well. Most agreed that more work needs to be done to tell stories about Edwards’s thought and life that are realistic, located, disturbing or edifying, depending on the perspective of the reader.¹

To address these challenges, this study investigates the persona of the philosophical theologian Jonathan Edwards by using the concept of persona as developed in philosophical and literary disciplines. In focusing on the persona of Edwards, the study traces the stance which he self-consciously developed, a stance which was to some degree both inherited and adopted, and shaped by both the private and public expectations of office as well as the context which set the parameters of such expectations.

Edwards dreamed of writing a great treatise that would ‘put every man clean out of conceit with his imagination’, a feat that would possibly have led to an academic career and perhaps an international eminence comparable with that of Locke or Newton.² A major contention of this book is that he was actively and deliberately involved in fashioning his life in order to achieve this goal. He consciously and consistently enhanced his natural talents as a writer. In his ‘Cover-Leaf Memoranda’ (1723–26),³ he set out a personal discipline for writing which he crafted into a sophisticated technique throughout his career. The ‘Cover-Leaf Memoranda’ contains a set of rules of composition which were designed to optimise the reception of his work by as wide an audience as possible.

Life was a struggle for Jonathan Edwards. His mature self-assessment was that he was ‘born to be a man of strife’. He certainly experienced more than his share of conflict during his life: conflict within himself over God’s sovereignty; conflict between his personal experience and his received tradition; conflict between his vocation and his personal quest for holiness; conflict between his philosophical worldview and that of the British and Continental Enlightenment thinkers; conflict between those who supported the awakenings and those who condemned them because of their excesses; conflict with his parishioners’ lax practices and his extended family’s lax ethics. All of these conflicts, and the careful and strategic ways in which he responded to them, contributed significantly to the formation of the persona of Edwards.

A New Approach

Philosophy provides a fertile starting point for such a study of Edwards, the philosophical theologian.⁴ During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ancient notions of philosophical personae were preserved and recovered and made central to the elaboration of philosophical debate.⁵ Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle and Locke were all engaged in defending and instantiating a philosophical persona against others they regarded as inimical to true philosophy.⁶ Their aim was to see a right relationship between what was said and who said it. This gave an utterance authority.⁷ Condren, Gaukroger and Hunter’s The Philosopher of Early Modern Europe (2006) shifts the focus ‘from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason’ to ‘the philosopher as a special persona’. The authors argue for a new and more thoroughly historical approach to the history of early modern philosophy and focus on the ‘complementary phenomena of the contested character of philosophy’ and the persona necessary for its practice, that is, ‘the purpose-built self whose cognitive capacities and moral bearing are cultivated for the sake of knowledge, deemed philosophical’. To understand a philosophical problem the philosopher must engage in a ‘process of self-presentation’ and an ‘act of self-problematization’, or advocate an ‘idealized character’ to which potential philosophers should aspire.⁸

In Rival Enlightenments (2001), Ian Hunter developed a particular approach to the history of philosophy in which he focuses on the ascetic or self-transformative work that certain philosophies required their adherents to perform on themselves, since only then can they address the object of knowledge to which they promise access. This approach operates principally by treating their different anthropologies and cosmologies, not in terms of the self they uncovered or even the cosmos they reveal, but in terms of the self they seek to shape for a world they envisage.⁹ Condren and Hunter elsewhere identify two overlapping aspects of the philosophical persona in their introduction to The Persona of the Philosopher in the Eighteenth Century (2008).¹⁰ There was clearly the technical, comprising the sorts of practical and intellectual skills needed for philosophising, but there was also the more overtly ethical. The persona entailed cultivation of a moral disposition to enquiry and the responsibilities of communication and teaching. They noted that, since antiquity, the overarching and highly accommodating distinction between the active and contemplative lives had provided the most general rubric for exploring the priorities of a philosophical life.¹¹ In Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (2006), Conal Condren stresses the importance of persona to office, which he defines as ‘the expectation that people must behave according to the requirements of their respective offices. Moral, political and intellectual judgment was a function of office and the agent was a persona’.¹²

In the field of literature, Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980) takes the sixteenth century as the focus for his study because it is the period when there was a large-scale sense of human identity as open to fashioning.¹³ Self-fashioning was a way of achieving a distinctive personality as a characteristic form of address to the world, thus delivering a consistent projection of perceiving and behaving, whereby one’s very nature and intentions can be represented in speech or actions.¹⁴ Greenblatt believes that self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from the fact that it functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life. It invariably crosses the boundaries between the creation of literary characters and the shaping of one’s own identity.¹⁵ Greenblatt developed protocols for the study of self-fashioning a persona in and through literature based on a number of governing conditions which he identified as being common to most instances of self-fashioning.¹⁶ His interpretive practice concerns itself with three major literary functions of ‘aliens’, ‘conflicts’ and ‘turning points’.¹⁷ Self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien. What is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack and hence any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss.¹⁸

In keeping with the insights of Hunter et al. into the construction of the persona of the philosopher and Greenblatt into self-fashioning, this book investigates the way in which Edwards fashioned himself as an ecclesiastical leader. Edwards was involved in just about every controversy that raged in his time and therefore the influence of the events that shaped his thought cannot be ignored through de-contextualising him. The tensions in Edwards’s life – within his own tradition and between his tradition and the surrounding socio-religious landscape/culture – cast most light on Edwards the person.¹⁹

Jonathan Edwards was committed to embodying the truths he thought important to communicate. He well knew the value and authority of a visible, living testimony to the truth. At the outset of his career, Edwards established in his own life the core message that he would proclaim: God’s absolute sovereignty, his own personal inability, a new sense of the heart (will), and the idea of being swallowed up in God by God’s visible beauty, excellency and holiness. Edwards consistently presented himself and his own consummate example of this as the ideal to which others should aspire. Clearly he possessed the practical and intellectual skills necessary to disc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 The Elusive Jonathan Edwards
• 2 Edwards’s Concept of and Submission to an Absolute Authority
• 3 The External Threatening Other
• 4 The Internal Threatening Other
• 5 One Man’s Authority is Another Man’s Alien
• 6 The Development of Edwards’s Literary Persona
• 7 Turning Points: The Persona Established
• 8 Understanding Edwards the Man
• Bibliography
• Index