Pantheism, I must consider this last proposition, which is of vital
importance in Edwards' system, and of which the theological and the
metaphysical element is curiously blended. God is to the universe--to
use Edwards' own metaphor--what the sun is to our planet; and the
metaphor would have been more adequate if he had been acquainted with
modern science. The sun's action is the primary cause of all the
infinitely complex play of forces which manifest themselves in the fall
of a raindrop or in the operations of a human brain. But as some bodies
may seem to resist the action of the sun's rays, so may some created
beings set themselves in opposition to the Divine Will. To a
thoroughgoing Pantheist, indeed, such an opposition must appear to be
impossible if we look deep enough, and sin, in this sense, be merely an
illusion, caused by our incapacity of taking in the whole design of the
Almighty. Edwards, however, though dimly aware of the difficulty, is not
so consistent in his Pantheism as to be much troubled with it. He admits
that, by some mysterious process, corruption has intruded itself into
the Divine universe. The all-pervading harmony is marred by a discord
due, in his phraseology, to the fall of man. Over the ultimate cause of
this discord lies a veil which can never be withdrawn to mortal
intelligence. Assuming its existence, however, virtue consists, if one
may so speak, in that quality which fits a man to be a conducting
medium, and vice in that which makes him a non-conducting medium to the
solar forces. This proposition is confounded in Edwards' mind, as in
that of most metaphysicians, with the very different proposition that
virtue consists in recognising the Divine origin of those forces. It is
characteristic, in fact, of his metaphysical school, to identify the
logical with the causal connection, and to assume that the definition of
a thing necessarily constitutes its essence. 'Virtue,' says Edwards, 'is
the union of heart to being in general, or to God, the Being of beings'
(ii. 421), and thus consists in the intellectual apprehension of Deity,
and in the emotion founded upon and necessarily involving the
apprehension. The doctrine that whatever is done so as to promote the
glory of God is virtuous, is with him identified with the doctrine that
whatever is done consciously in order to promote the glory of God is
virtuous. The major premiss of the syllogism which proves an action to
be virtuous must be actually present to the mind of the agent. This, in
utilitarian phraseology, is to confound between the criterion and the
motive. If it is, as Edwards says, the test of a virtuous action that it
should tend to 'the highest good of being in general,' it does not
follow that an action is only virtuous when done with a conscious
reference to that end. But Edwards overlooks or denies the distinction,
and assumes, for example, as an evident corollary, that a love of
children or friends is only virtuous in so far as it is founded on a
desire for the general good, which, in his sense, is a desire for the
glory of God (ii. 428). He judges actions, that is, not by their
tendency, but by their nature; and their nature is equivalent to their
logic.
His metaphysical theory coincides precisely with his theological view,
and is generally expressed in theological language. The love of 'Being
in general' is the love of God. The intellectual intuition is the
reflection of the inward light, and the recognition of a mathematical
truth is but a different phase of the process which elsewhere produces
conversion. Intuition is a kind of revelation and revelation is a
special intuition.
One of his earliest published sermons is devoted to prove the existence
of 'a Divine and supernatural light, immediately imparted to the soul by
the Spirit of God' (vol. viii., sermon xxvii.). On that fundamental
doctrine his whole theological system is based; as his metaphysical
system rests on the existence of absolute _à priori_ truths. The
knowledge of God sums up all true beliefs, and justifies all virtuous
emotions, as the power of God supports all creation at every instant.
'It is by a Divine influence that the laws of nature are upheld, and a
constant concurrence of Divine power is necessary in order to our being,
moving, or having a being' (v. 419). To be constantly drawing sustenance
from the eternal power which everywhere underlies the phenomena of the
world is the necessary condition of spiritual life, as to breathe the
air is the condition of physical life. The force which this conception,
whether true or false, exercises over the imagination, and the depth
which it gives to Edwards' moral views, are manifest at every turn.
Edwards rises far above those theories, recurring in so many different
forms, which place the essence of religion in some outward observances,
or in a set of propositions not vitally connected with the spiritual
constitution. Edwards' contemporaries, such as Lardner or Sherlock,
thought that to be a Christian was to accept certain results of
antiquarian research. With a curious _naïveté_ they sometimes say that a
ploughman or a cobbler could summarily answer the problems which have
puzzled generations of critics. Edwards sees the absurdity of hoping
that a genuine faith can ever be based on such balancing of historical
probabilities. The cobbler was to be awed by the learned man; but how
could he implicitly trust a learned man when his soul was at stake, and
when learned men differed? To convince the ignorant or the Houssatunnuck
Indian, God's voice must speak through a less devious channel. The
transcendent glory of Divine things proves their Divinity intuitively;
the mind does not indeed discard argument, but it does not want any
'long chain of argument; the argument is but one and the evidence
direct; the mind ascends to the truth of the Gospel but by one step, and
that is its Divine glory.' The moral theory of the contemporary
rationalists was correlative to their religious theory. To be religious
was to believe that certain facts had once happened; to be moral was to
believe that under certain circumstances you would at some future time
go to hell. Virtue of that kind was not to Edwards' taste, though few
men have been less sparing in using the appeal to damnation. But threats
of hell-fire were only meant to startle the sinner from his repose. His
morality could be framed from no baser material than love to the Divine
perfections. 'What thanks are due to you for not loving your own misery,
and for being willing to take some pains to escape burning in hell to
all eternity? There is ne'er a devil in hell but would gladly do the
same' (viii. 145).
The strength, however, and the weakness of Edwards as a moralist are
best illustrated from the two treatises on the Religious Affections and
on Original Sin. The first, which was the fruit of his experiences at
Northampton, may be described as a system of religious diagnostics. By
what symptoms are you to distinguish--that was the problem which forced
itself upon him--the spiritual state produced by the Divine action from
that which is but a hollow mockery? After his mode of judging in
concrete cases, as already indicated, we are rather surprised by the
calm and sensible tone of his argument. The deep sense of the vast
importance of the events to which he was a witness makes him the more
scrupulous in testing their real character. He resists the temptation to
dwell upon those noisy and questionable manifestations in which the
vulgar thirst for the wonderful found the most appropriate testimony to
the work. Roman Catholic archbishops at the present day can exhort their
hearers to put their faith in a silly story of a vision, on the express
ground that the popularity of the belief amongst Catholics proves its
Divine origin. That is wonderfully like saying that a successful lie
should be patronised so long as it is on the side of the Church.
Edwards, brought up in a manlier school, deals with such phenomena in a
different spirit. Suppose, he says, that a person terrified by threats
of hell-fire has a vision 'of a person with a beautiful countenance,
smiling on him with arms open and with blood dropping down,' whom he
supposes to be Christ come to promise him eternal life, are we to assume
that this vision and the consequent transports infallibly indicate
supernatural agency? No, he replies, with equal sense and honesty; 'he
must have but slightly considered human nature who thinks such things
cannot arise in this manner without any supernatural excitement of
Divine power' (iv. 72). Many mischievous delusions have their origin in
this error. 'It is a low, miserable notion of spiritual sense' to
suppose that these 'external ideas' (ideas, that is, such as enter by
the senses) are proofs of Divine interference. Ample experience has
shown that they are proofs not of the spiritual health which comes from
communion with God, but of 'weakness of body and mind and distempers of
body' (iv. 143). Experience has supplied exemplary confirmations of
Edwards' wisdom. Neither bodily convulsions, nor vehement excitement of
mind, nor even revelations of things to come (iv. 158), are sufficient
proofs of that mysterious change of soul which is called conversion. No
external test, in fact, can be given. Man cannot judge decisively, but
the best symptoms are such proofs as increased humility, a love of
Christ for His own sake, without reference to heaven or hell, a sense of
the infinite beauty of Divine things, a certain 'symmetry and
proportion' between the affections themselves (iv. 314), a desire for
higher perfection, and a rich harvest of the fruit of Christian
practice.
So far, Edwards is unassailable from his own point of view. Our theory
of religion may differ from his; but at least he fully realises how
profound is the meaning of the word, and aims at conquering all human
faculties, not at controlling a few external manifestations. But his
further applications of the theory lead him into more doubtful
speculations. That Being, a union with whom constitutes true holiness,
is not only to be the ideal of perfect goodness, but He must be the God
of the Calvinists, who fulfils the stipulations of a strange legal
bargain, and the God of the Jews, who sentences whole nations to
massacre for the crimes of their ancestors. Edwards has hitherto been
really protesting against that lower conception of God which is latent
in at least the popular versions of Catholic or Arminian theology, and
to which Calvinism opposes a loftier view. God, on this theory, is not
really almighty, for the doctrine of free-will places human actions and
their results beyond His control. He is scarcely omniscient, for, like
human rulers, He judges by actions, not by the intrinsic nature of the
soul, and therefore distributes His rewards and punishments on a system
comparable to that of mere earthly jurisprudence. He is at most the
infallible judge of actions, not the universal ordainer of events and
distributor of life and happiness. Edwards' profound conviction of the
absolute sovereignty of God leads him to reject all such feeble
conceptions. But he has now to tell us where the Divine influence has
actually displayed itself; and his view becomes strangely narrowed.
Instead of confessing that all good gifts come from God, he infers that
those which do not come from his own God must be radically vicious.
Already, as we have seen, in virtue of his leading principle, he has
denied to all natural affections the right to be truly virtuous. Unless
they involve a conscious reference to God, they are but delusive
resemblances of the reality. He admits that the natural man can in
various ways produce very fair imitations of true virtue. By help of
association of ideas, for example, or by the force of sympathy, it is
possible that benevolence may become pleasing and malevolence
displeasing, even when our own interest is not involved (ii. 436). Nay,
there is a kind of moral sense natural to man, which consists in a
certain preception of the harmony between sin and punishment, and which
therefore does not properly spring from self-love. This moral sense may
even go so far as to recognise the propriety of yielding all to the God
from whom we receive everything (ii. 443), and the justice of the
punishment of sinners. And yet this natural conscience does not imply
the existence of a 'truly virtuous taste or determination of the mind to
relish and delight in the essential beauty of true virtue, arising from
a virtuous benevolence of the heart' (ii. 445). God has bestowed such
instincts upon men for their preservation here; but they will disappear
in the next world, where no such need for them exists. He is driven,
indeed, to make some vague concessions (against which his enlightened
commentators protest), to the effect that 'these things [the natural
affections] have something of the general nature of virtue, which is
love' (ii. 456); but no such uncertain affinity can make them worthy to
be reckoned with that union with God which is the effect of the Divine
intervention alone.
Edwards is thus in the singular position of a Pantheist who yet regards
all nature as alienated from God; and in the treatise on Original Sin he
brings out the more revolting consequences of that view by help of the
theological dogma of corruption. He there maintains in its fullest sense
the terrible thesis, that all men are naturally in a state of which the
inevitable issue is their 'utter eternal perdition, as being finally
accursed of God and the subjects of His remediless wrath through sin'
(vi. 137). The evidence of this appalling statement is made up, with a
simplicity which would be amusing if employed in a less fearful cause,
of various texts from Scripture, quoted, of course, after the most
profoundly unhistorical fashion; of inferences from the universality of
death, regarded as the penalty incurred by Adam; of general reflections
upon the heathen world and the idolatry of the Jews; and of the
sentences pronounced by Jehovah against the Canaanites. In one of his
sermons, of portentous length and ferocity (vol. vii., sermon iii.), he
expands the doctrine that natural men--which includes all men who have
not gone through the mysterious process of conversion--are God's
enemies. Their heart, he says, 'is like a viper, hissing and spitting
poison at God;' and God requites their ill-will with undying enmity and
never-ceasing torments. Their unconsciousness of that enmity, and even
their belief that they are rightly affected towards God, is no proof
that the enmity does not exist. The consequences may be conceived. 'God
who made you has given you a capacity to bear torment; and He has that
capacity in His hands; and He can enlarge it and make you capable of
more misery, as much as He will. If God hates anyone and sets Himself
against him as His enemy, what cannot He do with him? How dreadful it
must be to fall into the hands of such an enemy!' (vii. 201). How
dreadful, we add, is the conception of the universe which implies that
God is such an enemy of the bulk of His creatures; and how strangely it
combines with the mild Pantheism which traces and adores the hand of God
in all natural objects! The doctrine, it is to be observed, which is
expanded through many pages of the book on Original Sin, is not merely
that men are legally guilty, as being devoid of 'true virtue,' though
possessed of a certain factitious moral sense, but that they are
actually for the most part detestably wicked. One illustration of his
method may be sufficient. The vileness of man is proved by the remark
(not peculiar to Edwards), that men who used to live 1,000 years now
live only 70; whilst throughout Christendom their life does not average
more than 40 or 50 years; so that 'sensuality and debauchery' have
shortened our days to a twentieth part of our former allowance.
Thus the Divine power, which is in one sense the sole moving force of
the universe, is limited, so far as its operation upon men's hearts is
concerned, to that small minority who have gone through the process of
conversion as recognised by Edwards' sect. All others, heathens,
infants, and the great mass of professed Christians, are sentenced to
irretrievable perdition. The simplicity with which he condemns all other
forms even of his own religion is almost touching. He incidentally
remarks, for example, that external exercises may not show true virtue,
because they have frequently proceeded from false religion. Members of
the Romish Church and many ancient 'hermits and anchorites' have been
most energetic in such exercises, and Edwards once lived next to a Jew
who appeared to him 'the devoutest person that he ever saw in his life'
(iv. 90); but, as he quietly assumes, all such appearances must of
course be delusive.
Once more, then, we are brought back to the question, How could any man
hold such doctrines without going mad? or, as experience has reconciled
us to that phenomenon, How could a man with so many elevated conceptions
of the truth reconcile these ghastly conclusions to the nobler part of
his creed? Edwards' own explanations of the difficulty--such as they
are--do not help us very far. The argument by which he habitually
defends the justice of the Almighty sounds very much like a poor quibble
in his mouth, though it is not peculiar to him. Our obligation towards
God, he says, must be in proportion to His merits; therefore it is
infinite. Now there is no merit in paying a debt which we owe; and hence
the fullest discharge of our duty deserves no reward. On the other hand,
there is demerit in refusing to pay a debt; and therefore any
short-coming deserves an infinite penalty (vi. 155). Without examining
whether our duty is proportional to the perfection of its object, and is
irrespective of our capacities, there is one vital objection to this
doctrine, which Edwards had adopted from less coherent reasoners. His
theory, as I have said, so far from destroying virtue, gives it the
fullest possible meaning. There can be no more profound distinction than
between the affections which harmonise with the Divine will and those
which are discordant, though it might puzzle a more consistent Pantheist
to account for the existence of the latter. That, however, is a primary
doctrine with Edwards. But if virtue remains, it is certain that his
theory seems to be destructive both of merit and demerit as between man
and God. If we are but clay in the hands of the potter, there is no
intelligible meaning in our deserving from him either good or evil. We
are as He has made us. Edwards explains, indeed, that the sense of
desert implies a certain natural congruity between evil-doing and
punishment (ii. 430). But the question recurs, how in such a case the
congruity arises? It is one of the illusions which should disappear when
we rise to the sphere of the absolute and infinite. The metaphor about a
debt and its payment, though common in vulgar Calvinism, is quite below
Edwards' usual level of thought. And, if we try to restate the argument
in a more congenial form, its force disappears. The love of God, even
though imperfect, should surely imply some conformity to His nature; and
even an imperfect love should hardly be confounded, one might fancy,
with an absolute enmity to the Creator. Though the argument, which is
several times repeated, appears to have satisfied Edwards, it would have
been more in harmony with his principles to declare that, as between man
and his God, there could be no question of justice. The absolute
sovereignty of the Creator is the only, and to him it should be the
conclusive, answer to such complaints. But, whatever may be the fate of
this apology, the one irremovable difficulty remains behind. If God be
the one universal cause of all things, is He not the cause of evil as
well as good? Do you not make God, in short, the author of sin?
With this final difficulty, which, indeed, besets all such theories,
Edwards struggles long and with less than his usual vigour. He tries to
show, and perhaps successfully, that the difficulty concerns his
opponents as much as himself. They can, at least, escape only by
creating a new kind of necessity, under the name of contingency; for God
is, on this theory, like a mariner who has constantly to shape his
course to meet unforeseen and uncontrollable gusts of wind (v. 298); and
to make the best of it. He insists upon the difference, not very
congenial to his scheme, between ordering and permitting evil. The sun,
he says (v. 293), causes light, but is only the occasion of darkness.
If, however, the sun voluntarily retired from the world, it could
scarcely evade the responsibility of its absence. And, finally, he makes
the ordinary distinction, and that which is perhaps the best answer to
be made to an unanswerable difficulty. Christ's crucifixion, he says,
was so far bad as it was brought about by malignant murderers: but as
considered by God, with a view to all its glorious consequences, it was
not evil, but good (v. 297). And thus any action may have two aspects;
and that which appears to us, whose view is necessarily limited, as
simply evil, may, when considered by an infinite intelligence, as part
of the general order of things, be absolutely good. God does not will
sin as sin, but as a necessary part of a generally perfect system.
Here, however, in front of that ultimate mystery which occurs in all
speculation, I must take leave of this singular thinker. In a
frequently-quoted passage, Mackintosh speaks of his 'power of subtle
argument, perhaps unmatched, certainly unsurpassed amongst men.' The
eulogy seems to be rather overstrained, unless we measure subtlety of
thought rather by the complexity and elaboration of its embodiment than
by the keenness of the thought itself. But that Edwards possessed
extraordinary acuteness is as clear as it is singular that so acute a
man should have suffered his intellectual activity to be restrained
within such narrow fetters. Placed in a different medium, under the same
circumstances, for example, as Hume or Kant, he might have developed a
system of metaphysics comparable in its effect upon the history of
thought to the doctrines of either of those thinkers. He was, one might
fancy, formed by nature to be a German professor, and accidentally
dropped into the American forests. Far away from the main currents of
speculation, ignorant of the conclusions reached by his most cultivated
contemporaries, and deriving his intellectual sustenance chiefly from an
obsolete theology, with some vague knowledge of the English followers of
Locke, his mind never expanded itself freely. Yet, even after making
allowance for his secluded life, we are astonished at the powerful grasp
which Calvinism, in its expiring age, had laid upon so penetrating an
intellect. The framework of dogma was so powerful, that the explosive
force of Edwards' speculations, instead of destroying his early
principles by its recoil, expended its whole energy along the line in
which orthodox opinion was not injured. Most bold speculators, indeed,
suffer from a kind of colour-blindness, which conceals from them a whole
order of ideas, sufficiently familiar to very inferior minds. Edwards'
utter unconsciousness of the aspect which his doctrines would present to
anyone who should have passed beyond the charmed circle of orthodox
sentiment is, however, more surprising than the similar defect in any
thinker of nearly equal acuteness. In the middle of the eighteenth
century, he is still in bondage to the dogmas of the Pilgrim Fathers; he
is as indifferent to the audacious revolt of the deists and Hume as if
the old theological dynasty were still in full vigour; and the fact,
whatever else it may prove, proves something for the enduring vitality
of the ideas which had found an imperfect expression in Calvinism.
Clearing away the crust of ancient superstition, we may still find in
Edwards' writings a system of morality as ennobling, and a theory of the
universe as elevated, as can be discovered in any theology. That the
crust was thick and hard, and often revolting in its composition, is,
indeed, undeniable; but the genuine metal is there, no less unmistakably
than the refuse.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The Works of President Edwards. Worcester (Mass.), 1808.
[8] The population of Massachusetts is stated at 164,000 inhabitants in
1742, and 240,000 in 1761.--_See_ Holmes' Annals.
[9] These early New England patriarchs were blessed with abundant
families. Edwards' father had eleven children, his paternal grandfather
thirteen, and his maternal grandfather had twelve children by a lady who
had already three children by a previous marriage.
[10] See an interesting article in the 'American Cyclopedia,' which has,
however, this odd peculiarity, that it never mentions hell in discussing
the theories of Edwards.
_HORACE WALPOLE_