The great awakener

Commonweal, June 6, 2003 by Edward T. Oakes

One Sabbath morning in June 1735, after having fallen into a deep melancholy and suffered from insomnia for two months, Hawley slit his throat and died within a half-hour. Given Edwards's own relentlessly logical Calvinism, his response to his uncle's death was predictable, if shocking to modern ears: "God sometimes expresses his wrath towards wicked men in this world not only outwardly but also in the inward expressions of it on their consciences." Sometimes terrible sufferings in this world, he said, "are but forerunners of their punishment."

Such a gulf separates us from Edwards that Marsden has performed a near miracle by making the man truly sympathetic to the modern reader, or at least to readers willing to concede Marsden's point that "we will never learn anything from sages of the past unless we get over our naive assumption that the most recently popular modes of thought are the best." Under that rubric, his biography lets Edwards's magnificence shine through, despite the tragedy--both personal and pastoral--of his ministry. Although his new post in Stockbridge entailed real financial hardship (his wife Sarah bore him ten children), he finally had time to write and penned brilliant defenses of such central Calvinist doctrines as biblical inspiration, the freedom and servility of the will, original sin and the total depravity of man.

Despite Edwards's perhaps exaggerated views of human nature and his at times unbending ways as pastor, he could also be a brilliant and incisive reader of souls. The Great Awakening, in fact, began when young males in their teens and twenties were drawn away from their farms and their fixation on sex to, of all places, Edwards's private study: "Persuasion had softened hearts that coercion alone would have only hardened," Marsden rightly notes. And one evening the Spirit came swooshing down in a Pentecostal rush on this youthful gathering, and history was made.

Even though Edwards was hobbled with a theology of conversion that would eventually be his undoing, he also proved to be a master spiritual director, so much so that some of his writings on the subject sound remarkably like those of Ignatius of Loyola: "I am determined never to do any manner of thing," he said, "whether in soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of God.... The person of Christ appeared to me great enough to swallow up all thought and conception. [This vision] lasted about an hour, which kept me in a flood of tears and weeping aloud." Both men were also quite willing to instill in others a vivid, sensible fear of hell as a prelude to knowing the mercies of Christ.

Edwards's wife Sarah was even more of a mystic, and Marsden's descriptions of her ecstasies will remind any reader of Teresa of Avila:

   [A visiting preacher] offered a prayer during which Sarah found herself
   wishing he would address God as "Father." She greatly desired to be able
   "without the least misgiving of heart, to call God my Father." Retiring to
   be alone to contemplate this, she was overcome with ecstasy. "God the
   Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, seemed as distinct persons," she later
   recounted, "both manifesting their inconceivable loveliness, and mildness,
   and gentleness".... The next morning in a similar setting she was even more
   overcome, first falling down in a swoon and later leaping from her chair
   when especially moved.