Edwards on God

Sebastian Rehnman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000261295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Jonathan Edwards is generally acknowledged as one of the foremost American philosophers. Edwards on God offers a historically informed philosophical analysis of his arguments for the existence and nature of God.

The book begins with a characterization of Edwards's intellectual profile and philosophical theology. It then explicates and evaluates his arguments from the beginning of existence, design, 'being in general', virtue as benevolence, and his account of natural and moral divine attributes. There is no other such treatment of Edwards's metaphysics of divinity.

This volume will be primarily relevant to philosophers, historians and theologians.

1
Philosophical theologian

Introduction

Jonathan Edwards is generally acknowledged to be one of the most prominent American philosophers.¹ He was born 5 October 1703, East Windsor, Connecticut, and pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale College from 1716 to 1722.² After a period of independent study and ministry in various churches, Yale appointed Edwards tutor in May 1724, where he seems to have taught all the main subjects of philosophy. In February 1727, he became minister in Northampton of the most prominent church in the region and held this position until his dismissal in 1750. He then settled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and completed his major books Freedom of the Will (1754), Original Sin (1758), Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (1765) and The Nature of True Virtue (1765). Earlier publications included Religious Affections (1746). In addition, Edwards wrote nine folio volumes of publishable drafts with titles like ‘Natural Philosophy’, ‘Of Being’, ‘Of Atoms’, ‘The Mind’ plus a mass of numbered and indexed ‘Miscellanies’.³ In 1757 he was appointed president of Princeton College, but died on 22 March 1758, following a smallpox inoculation.

In this chapter I seek to provide an intellectual profile and a characterization of Edwards’s philosophical theology. For Edwards belongs to a generally unknown past the rudimentary knowledge of which (at least) is requisite for a historically adequate analysis of his philosophical arguments about God. The philosophical profile also aims to show that – contrary to past scholarship – there are not one or two philosophers who influenced Edwards, but that he dialogued with a broad range of thinkers who sought to answer the same questions in a variety of ways.⁴ In the next section I sketch Edwards’s philosophical framework and in the following section outline philosophical theology in general with Edwards’s philosophical theology in particular.

Philosophical development

In this section I explore Edwards’s philosophical outlook from his studies, teaching, and research. He expresses this framework most succinctly in the following way: ‘all existence is perception’.⁵ Edwards’s account of reality is in other words a sort of idealism or immaterialism, namely that mind and its ideas constitute what is real.⁶ Although much research has been done on his immaterialism, ‘the sources of Edwards’s youthful metaphysical idealism is the ‘perennially intriguing problem in American intellectual history.’⁷ In this section I seek to show that Edwards’s idealism grew out of his studies, teaching, and research. What and how much Edwards understood of this development as a student is hard to tell but must be judged from his later writings. These writings show though his endorsement of early eighteenth century notions and experiments, and from this general philosophical framework Edwards developed immaterialism – just as John Norris, Arthur Collier, George Berkeley, Samuel Johnson (of Yale), and a host of other contemporary thinkers did something similar.⁸ His arrival at or development of idealism is thus not intriguing, if by ‘intriguing’ is meant something remarkable or curious.

Although there is no complete contemporary record of his curriculum and earliest sources, the main scope of Edwards’s syllabus can be reconstructed from circumstantial evidence, and the chief philosophical influences can be inferred from his (early) writings.⁹ His studies agreed most likely with the Harvard College education of his father and grammar school teacher Timothy Edwards as well as of his Yale tutor and cousin Elisha Williams.¹⁰ During the second half of the seventeenth century Harvard had abandoned a traditional or broadly Aristotelian curriculum and adopted a modern or roughly Cartesian curriculum.¹¹ At Yale, Williams assigned textbooks to Edwards that the latter inherited from his father’s studies at Harvard. The undergraduate course progressed from logic and ethics to physics and metaphysics, while the graduate studies seem to have been by individual arrangement.¹² By the time of his graduate studies, Edwards explored the best library in the colonies.¹³ When he became tutor the curriculum was much the same as during his own studentship¹⁴ and he was also given the task of cataloguing the books of the college library, which enabled him to excerpt reviews and abstracts from a wide range of periodicals, dictionaries, and monographs.¹⁵ So Edwards’s studies and teaching at Yale were transformative. This can be seen more particularly from how each major area of philosophy – logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics – is reflected in his writings, especially in logic.¹⁶

Edwards received and conveyed instruction in logic based on longstanding Cartesian textbooks.¹⁷ These were as much introductions to epistemology as to logic, and accomplished the so-called ‘epistemological turn’ in European philosophy from the judgment that there is something to that something is known. Thus, the object of knowledge is ideas rather than things. In Edwards’s words: ‘We immediately perceive nothing else but the ideas which are this moment extant in our minds. We perceive or know other things only by means of these, as necessarily connected with others, and dependent on them.’¹⁸ These immediately perceived ideas he supposed are caused by the impact of atoms on our sense organs and the motions thus generated are transmitted by the nerves to the brain: ‘‘Tis by impressions made on the brain, that any ideas are excited in the mind, by the motion of the animal spirits, or any changes made in the body.’¹⁹ These ideas are ‘perceptions’, ‘images’, ‘pictures’, ‘resemblances’, or ‘representations’ on or in the brain that the mind senses:

An idea is only a perception wherein the mind is passive, or rather, subjective.²⁰

Ideas are images of things; and there are no other images of things, in the most proper sense, but ideas, because other things are only called images as they beget an idea in us of the thing of which they are the image; so that all other images of things are but images in a secondary sense.²¹

This mechanical account of perception was generally accepted among scholars at the time and influenced semantics, so that words were regarded as signifying pictures in the brain – ‘their audience in the brain, the mind’s presence-room’²² – that the mind names. Humans understand and attend to the meaning of words, according to Edwards, when they are ‘connecting any idea with them’, since ideas are ‘properly signified by words, naturally excited in their minds on hearing the words’ and without ideas ‘the words have no sense in thought to answer them’.²³ So, the meaning of a word is an idea, image or picture. In logic, finally, Cartesian-empiricists reduced types of predicates to those that were mathematically or geometrically describable, so that the predicate of substance is substituted by extension, the predicates of quality, action, and passion are revised to those of quantity, figure, and motion, and predicates of relation are transferred to ‘affection of reason’ or modification of mind.²⁴ From all this it is clear that Edwards endorsed the view that we immediately perceive nothing but ideas in the mind, that our words signify ideas and that we can account for perception in exclusively mechanical terms.

In moral philosophy, Edwards’s training and teaching were likewise based on established texts.²⁵ Cartesians developed ethics as an outgrowth of the irreducibility of the thinking mind to the mechanical operations of extended bodies. For bodily motions are transmitted by the nerves to the brain and thereby give rise to passions in the mind. Thus ‘it is not the body, but the mind only, that is the proper seat of the affections.’²⁶ To Edwards and his like-minded, this mechanistic physiology required a new account of mastering the passions in which a notion of virtue became crucial: ‘virtue in its most essential nature, consists in benevolent affection or propensity of heart towards being in general’.²⁷ Accordingly all Edwards’s treatises on affections, will and virtue belong to the mid-eighteenth century discussion of the relation between passions, sentiments, feelings or emotions on the one hand and reason on the other.²⁸ His ethics course thus seems to have reinforced a view of the immediate access to the mind and (at least) prepared the way for a dualist anthropology.

Edwards studied and taught moreover nature through standard works in the mechanistic physics that Descartes invented.²⁹ The importance of this mathematic-experimental ideal in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is hard to overestimate, and its popularity arose out of the rediscovery of the atomistic conjectures of Democritus, the powerful application of mathematics to matter, the renewed and rapid development of mechanics, and the graphic illustration of the universe as a machine or a game of billiards.³⁰ Edwards firmly adhered to this view of nature:

All bodies whatsoever, except atoms themselves, must of absolute necessity be composed of atoms, or of bodies that are indiscerpible, that cannot be made less, or whose parts cannot by any finite power whatsoever, be separated one from another.³¹

He believed that Newton’s ‘laws of motion and gravitation hold universally’.³² Consistent with mathematics, matter is conceived as extension in motion, where ‘extension’ means that which has such geometrical qualities as shape, size, and divisibility, and ‘motion’ means the local change of a quantity. Consequently, this programme treated those qualities that can be described in kinematic or geometric terms as ‘real’ and those that can be described in sensuous terms as ‘appearances’. Since the former qualities can enter into (purported) scientific explanations, they are ‘primary’, and while the latter qualities cannot enter into such explanations, they are ‘secondary’. Matter can then, according to Edwards, be said to have the ‘essential and primary qualities’ of solidity, gravity, and mobility,³³ whereas sounds, colours, and pains are not qualities of things but of minds.³⁴ This mechanistic notion of nature established for him that the world of perception must differ from the world of physics.

Last, in metaphysics Edwards studied and taught in the Cartesian-empiricist tradition with a focus on natural theology and human psychology.³⁵ He thought that ‘metaphysics’ had made great ‘progress’ in his age and had been ‘brought to greater perfection than once it was’.³⁶ The Cartesian trajectory exclusively and exhaustively divided being into minds as thinking substances and bodies as extension in motion: ‘An intellectual substance is a thinking substance; or a thing where in Immediately there is cogitation [- - -] A materiall substance or a body is a substance extended into length, weadth & profundity.’³⁷ Unperceivable substances exist independently and sensible properties depend on the existence of the substance they modify. Sensations, ideas, volitions, and passions modify mind, while size, shape, motion, and rest modify matter.³⁸ Yet here Edwards departed from the general framework:

[T]hose beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substantial beings, inasmuch as the being of other things is only by these. 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.³⁹

Thus, Edwards revises the dualism of mind and matter in his sources to a monism of minds as ‘the only proper and real and substantial beings’. In opposition to the view that spirits are ‘more like a shadow’ of material things, he repeatedly defends the view that ‘nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and […] bodies are but shadows’.⁴⁰ Just as bodies are ‘vulgarly’ supposed to cast shadows and thus shadows depend on bodies, so ‘metaphysically’ bodies are the shadows that minds cast and thus bodies depend on minds. This is how material things are ‘by these’ spiritual things. Edwards spells out this dependence more thoroughly:

[W]hen I say, “the material universe exists only in the mind” I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence on, the conception of other minds.⁴¹

Without a mind having an idea of a body or the material universe, they cannot exist. Their existence does not only depend on but consist in the conception of a mind. Thus ‘all existence is perception.’ He continues:

What we call body is nothing but a particular mode of perception; and what we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions, or an universe of coexisting and successive perceptions connected by such wonderful methods and laws.⁴²

The view that a body is a mode of a perceiving mind and a mind is a composite series of perceptions, raises of course the problem of how a body or the material universe can exist without a human conceiving them. It is here that God enters into the metaphysics of Edwards. For ‘the universal system, or sum total of existence’, is divided into ‘all ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Philosophical theologian
• 2 Whatsoever begins to exist must have a cause
• 3 Whatever is orderly is designed
• 4 Nothing but being
• 5 Divine virtue
• 6 Two kinds of attributes
• Afterword
• Index