Natural reason in Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards’ later writings can be placed in the context of the high watermark of the British Enlightenment. While geographically isolated, Edwards perceived the direct influence of rationalism even in New England Puritanism. Marsden suggests that Edwards, seeing this potential diversion from true religion, sought to demonstrate the theological inadequacy of Enlightenment reason (“only dimly reflected light”). The rising centrality of natural reason was connected in Edwards’ mind to liberalism and the undermining of divine grace and revelation. His own cousin advocated this new theology, in which “unprejudiced reason” was able to discern right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
Edwards saw this as a direct theological assault on true Christian faith. The new rationalism was a correlate to Arminianism or Socinianism, and undercut the agency of divine grace. The modern turn toward the immanent and the natural had displaced providence. Still, Edwards was not willing to concede reason to the moderns. What is perhaps most striking about his later writings is how Edwards attempts to reclaim reason for orthodoxy – and his rejection of fideism. While positioning himself as a Calvinist apologist against “the modern writers,” Edwards’ aimed to show that common reason was more consistent with “the gospel of Jesus Christ” than the grace-less rationality of the Enlightenment.
Marsden highlights the irony of the situation, since Edwards and the late heirs of the Reformation did much to create an atmosphere in which individual choice and reason could stand apart from the supernatural. One thinks of Charles Taylor’s definition of the “buffered self,” and just how far the later Puritans went in their embrace of this modern idea in which a person could distance her true essence from external forces and mediating institutions. There is this fascinating tension throughout Edwards’ own writing. In pastoral terms, Edwards saw creeping rationalism in the easy acceptance of nominal Christians as communicants. He viewed natural, or mimetic virtue, with suspicion, as it became a “watchword” of 18th century rationalism. In turn, Edwards emphasized “true virtue,” over and against the mere appearance of morality.
The tension in Edwards’ thought may arise here, at the juncture where his Calvinist theology intersects his profound humanism – that is, his appreciation of the beauty of providence working in nature and history. Like Calvin, Edwards affirmed that God was the sole source of truth. However, Calvin, writing before the Enlightenment, seems less guarded at times in his appreciation of what Edwards might have called “imperfect virtue” (e.g. Institutes, 2.2.15). While Edwards sought to protect true virtue from hypocrisy, one wonders whether he leans toward the same sort of ethical positivism assumed by the rationalists.
And yet, at other times, Edwards seems to embrace a mature Augustinianism. He assumes a coherent, theocentric cosmos, not a disjointed universe (again, using Taylor’s terminology). The perfect beauty of God draws creation toward Himself, inexorably. God loves His creations qua creations: “the more happiness the greater union: when the happiness is perfect, the union is perfect.” Perhaps here, Edwards provides an answer to his own pastoral dilemma: humanity desires beauty and benevolence, and yet if that beauty is out of sync with God’s love, it will end in discordance. This appears as the heart of his critique of purely natural modernity. And one wonders if that Augustinian perspective could be made to harmonize, pastorally, with a healthy appreciation of mimetic virtue, and the imperfections of Christ’s unruly Body, the church.
