Search WJE Online The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University 1. Early Experiences and Formal Education As son of the village parson, the young Edwards was reared in the ecclesiasticalacademic atmosphere of a home where sermons were always in the making and neighborhood youths were prepared for -- 4 -- college. His father was both the most learned and the most important man he knew, and the rhetoric of his father's preached sermons must have constituted the chief literary fare of his youth, along with the reading of the Scripture at home. His own narrative of religious experiences tells of his having played at religion in "a booth in a swamp," where he and some schoolmates retired for prayer, and though there is no mention of it, one wonders if the mawkishly zealous preacher's son must not have attempted an impromptu sermo on at least a few occasions. At any rate, he was "abundant in duties" and early entered the "element" where he was to live out his days. The early education of Edwards was of course first in the home, at his mother's knee and, later, at his father's tutoring school. There his education was focused, directly and indirectly, by the curriculum of Harvard College in the late seventeenth century. His mother's father, Solomon Stoddard, had been graduated from Harvard in 1662, his father in 1691, and the intellectually vital household must have been dominated by the cultural aura of the college, though removed many miles in space and more than a generation in time. And when, at the age of twelve, Edwards entered the infant Yale College, he was again placed under the tutelage of Harvard men. This suggests that Edwards was early exposed to the Latin classics, but had slight contact with modern belles lettres, that his studies in rhetoric were dominated by the philosophy of Peter Ramus, probably in the form of William Dugard's textbook, Rhetorices Elementa, and that his formal education -- 5 -- was ultimately directed to the Ramistic high ritual of the senior thesis, a logical and rhetorical tour de force in an exceedingly formal and artificial manner in Latin.
For a discussion of academic rhetoric and its relation to preaching in this period (and earlier), see Perry Miller's The New England Mind, The Seventeenth Century (2nd ed., Boston, Beacon Press, 1961), chs. XI and XII; and The New England Mind, From Colony to Province (Boston, Beacon Press, 1961), ch. XXV, the last selection calling attention to the changing attitude, in JE's time, toward the old Ramean formulations of rhetoric and logic. A superior student, Edwards was selected to deliver the valedictory oration at his graduation. But what is remarkable about his undergraduate education is the lack of a distinct impression, for none of his letters home, nor his adult writings that reflect on his youth, nor even the anecdotes scraped together by his biographers suggest that Edwards was undergoing a vital educational experience in the formal course of studies. The account of his reading Locke's Essay and his request for the Art of Thinking have the color of isolated events in his private intellectual life that stand out against the uniform gray background (not necessarily unpleasant) of his collegiate program. Edwards' intellectual pilgrimage seems always to have been an essentially solitary venture. The thoughts, books, and curricula of other men and institutions might be presented to him, but in the end he would educate himself; he was never desperate to rebel nor fond of innovation for its own sake, but he would unostentatiously select and reject, from the old and the new, according to some principle of personal taste. Although it is difficult and not always rewarding to attempt tracing influences upon a writer as restless, creative, and eclectic as Edwards, there are nevertheless some authors who have been accorded great attention because of their supposed intellectual influence upon him, for instance, John Locke and Nicholas Malebranche. Perry Miller focused upon Locke a generation ago and more recently Norman Fiering has argued for the contrary influence of Malebranche, debating whether Edwards' outlook is more akin to English empiricism or Continental rationalism. In matters of rhetoric as in ideas, there are elements in Edwards' vocabulary that may be identified as belonging to more than one faction or party, not to mention one person. -- 6 -- A "divine light" or a "sense of the heart" are common property of traditional Puritans, Pietists, Cambridge Platonists, secular moralists, and others, though each faction may attach radically different significations to such terms (as in the use of "people" in modern political rhetoric). But a common rhetorical vocabulary, especially when the
terms are distributed among several discrete arguments, may well be taken to represent traces of influence. In this connection, there is hardly a more interesting case than that of the possible rhetorical influence of the Cambridge Platonist, John Smith (1618 52). Cited and quoted at extraordinary length by Edwards in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Smith's expression of crucial concepts clearly appealed to Edwards. Although Smith's only publication, the posthumous Select Discourses, is mentioned in Edwards' "Catalogue" of books, the reference is little more than a perfunctory listing in a series of books recommended by a source book and reveals nothing of Edwards, not even whether or not he was already familiar with the book. It is certain, however, that Edwards had access to the book at a crucial period in his development, for a copy of the second edition was given to Yale College by "Mr. Newton" in 1714, presumably as part of the five-hundred-volume Dummer collection, and is still there. Thus Edwards could have read the book during his senior year in New Haven or during the two succeeding years of graduate study prior to his pastorate in New York. Any reader familiar with Edwards' idiom, and in particular with certain controlling images and metaphors from a wide variety of his writings, must be struck by the similarities of concept, terminology, and phrasing in the small volume of John Smith's printed writings. Thus the idea of God's communicating himself ad extra in the creation and that of his containing the creation within himself anticipate Edwards' meditations, from the early philosophical speculations to the -- 7 -- late End of Creation. And then the idea that sin weighs men down as lead, pulling them to hell "with the most swift and headlong motion" certainly encapsulates the central metaphor of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Likewise, the spider as an emblem of the sinner appears in another Smith discourse. There are indeed seemingly endless echoes, from the need of the saint to become nothing in himself, to God's manifesting himself "in clear and lovely stamps" through the creation, to the reflection that man can be truly deified through union with God in Affections, Will, and End. But such echoes, however striking in themselves, are of considerably less significance for both Smith and Edwards than a broad range of verbal correlations pertaining to the definition of religion itself. Here, whether one identifies the language with Cambridge Platonism or with the New Light sensibility of eighteenth-century New England, the rhetorical correlations between Smith and Edwards are so suggestive, even when not so strict and literal, as to constitute an intricate structure of allusive filaments. A glance at
some of Smith's dicta will indicate the outlines of this relationship. First, Smith insists that the Gospel covenant differs from the old Law in that whereas the Law was external, the Gospel is internal. The Law involved a communal ideology first; the Gospel begins in a subjective experience. Or put another way, Smith observes that the ancient Hebrews invented the concept of free will as a compensation for failed religious inspiration, as moderns who preach merit are cold, illiberal, servile, slavish, and do not love God. So much for Arminianism, old and new! On the other hand, the true Christian finds God through exploration of his own soul wherein he may find the divine reflected in personal perceptions of virtue. This is possible because God visits saints as a "Divine Efflux running quite through our Souls," as "an inward feeling and sensation." In fact, "Divine -- 8 -- Truth is not to be discerned so much in a mans Brain, as in his Heart There is a Divine and Spiritual sense which only is able to converse internally with the life and soul of Divine Truth, as mixing and uniting it self with it " Thus, "the true Metaphysical and Contemplative man shooting up above his own Self-rational life endeavours the nearest Union with the Divine Essence that may be. This Divine Knowledge makes us amorous of Divine beauty and this Divine Love and Purity reciprocally exalts Divine Knowledge " All of religion is then a kind of supernatural, natural process: no artifice or construct of men, though at bottom wholly consonant with reason which is, after all, but "a Beam of Divine light." Smith is led to conclude that "were I indeed to define Divinity, I should rather call it a Divine life, than a Divine science; it being something rather to be understood by a Spiritual sensation, then by any Verbal description, as all things of Sense of Life are best known by Sentient and Vital faculties " And without such a "living sense" of the attributes of true religion, one can no more be informed of them "by a naked Demonstration, then Colours can be perceived of a blind man by any Definition or Description which he can hear of them." However, "when Reason once is raised by the mighty force of the Divine Spirit into a converse with God, it is turned into Sense: That which before was only Faith well built upon sure Principles, (for such our Science may be) now becomes Vision." And the result of this spiritual transformation is nothing less than "a new Nature informing the Souls of men; it is a God-like frame of Spirit, discovering it self most of all in Serene and Clear Minds, in deep Humility, Meekness, Self-denial, Universal love of God and all true
Goodness, without Partiality and without Hypocrisie; hereby we are taught to know God, and knowing him to love him, and conform our selves as much as may be to all that Perfection which shines forth in him." "Being's consent to Being," the revelation of God's grandeur as recounted in the "Personal Narrative," the early meditation upon the -- 9 -- character of Sarah Pierrepont, or the late arguments relating to the nature of "true virtue": so much of Edwards' characteristic idiom, not to mention much of his overall intellectual agenda, is adumbrated in these Discourses by John Smith that it is impossible not to acknowledge the formative impact of the volume upon Edwards early in his career. This is not to say that Edwards did not make more "use" of other authors in his many studies; for instance, Smith's esteemed colleague, Henry More, has been shown to be one of the Cambridge Platonists most useful to Edwards, yet More's idiom is not generally suggestive of Edwards. Edwards took intellectual building materials from various authors as he needed them and reacted to particular ideas or theories from a wide variety of sources in developing his own concepts; however, in no case is there such a broad correlation of style, particularly of metaphor and symbol, as between Smith and Edwards. This is not to say that Edwards became a stylistic disciple of Smith, for if nothing else, a gulf of culture and sensibility separated the two writers: Smith is by comparison subtle, fluid, and organically structured in thought and argument, his penchant for biological-process metaphors revelatory of the latitudinarian cast of his mind; Edwards is the more architectonic, dichotomous, and abstract in the development of his thought, his preference for physical-process metaphors involving antithetical forces being reflective of the traditional Puritan sermon form as well as Calvinist doctrine. But such differences do not preclude influence of a profound and pervasive nature; rather, they highlight both the creative receptivity of Edwards and an artistic independence which resulted from his trust in the adequacy of the Scripture to all human reflection, and his reliance upon the vital homiletic tradition of New England. If the youthful Edwards took nothing more from the Cambridge Platonist than the notion that the operations of the mind (spirit) and the senses are wholly analogous, it must have prepared him for his curiously mediatorial role between such theoretical opposites as idealism and empiricism, or rationalism and sensationalism, which has occasioned much debate among both his immediate clerical followers and later scholarly interpreters.
Against the background of seventeenth-century culture and educational -- 10 -- forms, then, Edwards gradually awakened to his call to the ministry and the art of preaching. When he undertook preparation for the pulpit, he began by assimilating a rich tradition of English pulpit oratory and sermon literature. This tradition, deriving ultimately from the conventions of the English Puritan pulpit, had been shaped by a century of development in New England and the literary productions of many eminent preachers. Of course, the student preacher, if he wanted a full discussion of the theory of the Puritan sermon form, could go to one or more of the several studies of the art of preaching then in circulation: the classic, The Arte of Prophecying by William Perkins, or William Chappell's The Preacher, Richard Bernard's The Faithful Shepheard, or John Wilkins' Ecclesiastes. Since he was always a careful scholar, it is probable that Edwards did study at least one. But it would not have been necessary for him to study the art of "prophecying" abstractly, for the tradition of New England pulpit oratory was very much alive in Edwards' day; moreover, it was embodied in the very person of Timothy Edwards. The youth whose extraordinary powers of observation and analysis are illustrated in "Of Insects" would hardly have to go to a textbook in order to learn about sermon form after having sat all his life beneath his father's pulpit.