THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY of AMERICA the Providential Nature
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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA The Providential Nature of Politics in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of Politics School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Coyle B. Neal Washington, D.C. 2012 The Providential Nature of Politics in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards Coyle Neal, Ph.D. Director: Claes Ryn, Ph.D. Despite the obvious importance of Jonathan Edwards in American history, scholars have largely ignored his relevance for political thought. To ignore him is to miss a critical component in early American political philosophy and to have a skewed understanding of the subsequent history of revivals and revivalism that have shaped religion, politics, and philosophy in America. This dissertation addresses this oversight. It situates Edwards among American political thinkers and shows him to be an important piece in the American political tradition. This dissertation argues that for Jonathan Edwards politics is deeply historical in nature. He has a strong historical sense that is indistinguishable from his notion of Providence. The dissertation concludes that—in line with his theology, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics—the political philosophy of Jonathan Edwards is fundamentally historical and more akin to that of Burke, Hegel, Adams and other “conservative” thinkers than it is to Rousseau, Paine, and other revolutionary thinkers. The dissertation examines Edwards’ own writings as well as important secondary sources and interpretations of his work. It uses a traditional hermeneutical technique to systematize his social and political ideas and to draw out implications for political thought from his ostensibly non-political theological and philosophical writings. The first two chapters provide an overview of his life and thought and an introduction to his philosophy of history. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters discuss his views of the human being in terms of the will, affections, and original sin, with special emphasis on Edwards’s articulation of identity and “free” will as being historically rooted in an organic and providential relationship with both God and the rest of humanity. The sixth and seventh chapters engage Edwards’s doctrines of virtue, aesthetics, and teleology as they interact with the traditional doctrine of justification by faith in the concrete reality of history. The last chapter summarizes the thesis that Edwards’s political thought is historical rather than revolutionary. The chapter compares this conclusion to the rather different conclusions drawn by the only previous major work on Edwards’s political thought. Finally, the dissertation indicates specific needs for further study of Edwards’ political thought. This dissertation by Coyle B. Neal fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in Politics approved by Claes Ryn, Ph.D., as Director, and by David Walsh, Ph.D., and Stephen Nichols, Ph.D., as Readers. ______________________________ Claes Ryn, Ph.D., Director ______________________________ David Walsh, Ph.D., Reader ______________________________ Stephen Nichols, Ph.D., Reader ii Intellectualism produces, as it were, beautifully shaped, finely cornered and dazzlingly transparent ice-crystals. But underneath that ice the stream of the living water so easily runs dry. There may be gain in doctrinal abstractions, but true religion, as shown in the warm piety of the heart, suffers loss… Contemplative thought, reflections and meditations on the soul’s nearness unto God tend merely to correct the above-named error; tend to draw the soul away from the abstract in doctrine and life, back to the reality of religion; tend, with all due appreciation of ‘chemical’ analysis of the spiritual waters, to lead the soul back to the living Fountain itself, from whence these waters flow. –Abraham Kuyper, To Be Near Unto God, 16. For the spirit is what first possesses true reality of being, and it embraces everything ideally in itself, so that all that is beautiful is only really beautiful insofar as it participates in this higher reality and is produced by it.” –G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Art, 5. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE .....................................................................................................................................v CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER II: POLITICS AND HISTORY ........................................................................................32 CHAPTER III: FREEDOM OF THE WILL .......................................................................................63 CHAPTER IV: RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS ......................................................................................88 CHAPTER V: ORIGINAL SIN .....................................................................................................119 CHAPTER VI: VIRTUE AND BEAUTY ........................................................................................140 CHAPTER VII: THE END FOR WHICH GOD CREATED THE WORLD ...........................................160 CHAPTER VIII: TOWARDS AN EDWARDSEAN POLITICAL THEOLOGY ......................................180 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................200 iv PREFACE: EDWARDS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS Engagement and analysis of the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards from the perspective of political theory has long been needed. Treatments by political philosophers to date have been only cursory and preliminary in their study of Edwards.1 Three brief examples relevant to this dissertation will highlight this trend and show the need for further scholarship. Irving Babbitt admits that Edwards has “genuine religious elevation,”2 yet ultimately rejects his thought and argues that he “combined genuine religious insight with the most unacceptable form of theology.”3 Further, Babbitt charges Edwards with excessive intellectual pride (which is a fair charge), even as he admits that Edwards was “probably the most original thinker America produced before Emerson.”4 Nonetheless, Babbitt engages Edwards so tangentially and lightly that one suspects Babbitt had not actually read much of the source material, and rather relied on one of the many academic caricatures of Edwards popular at the end of the nineteenth century.5 This is truly unfortunate, given that Edwards and Babbitt have so much in common in their worldview as a whole. 1 Though Edwards has received much more attention from philosophers concerned with religion, aesthetics, and ethics (see chapters six and seven of this dissertation). 2 Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979), 165. There are similar dismissive passages in his Rousseau and Romanticism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 123- 124. 3 Irving Babbitt, Character & Culture: Essays on East and West (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 56. 4 Irving Babbitt, Masters of Modern French Criticism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1977), 357. For the charge of pride, see Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 214. 5 Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 214-215. For an example of a standard 19th century treatment of Edwards, see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jonathan Edwards: An Essay (New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1880). Babbitt seems to have been familiar specifically with this work much more than with Edwards’s own v Eric Voegelin gives his examination of Edwards in On the Form of the American Mind, where he identifies Edwards as a foundational American thinker and as the beginning of the break between traditional Puritan thought and modern American Protestantism. Specifically, Voegelin argues that Puritans had lived with the tension that exists between the dogma of the absolutely Transcendent God (typified in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination) and the warm personal mysticism of an intimate religious experience. Voegelin suggests that Edwards is the beginning of the split between these two which both favors experience over dogma and results in an intellectual pantheism. The strengths of Voegelin’s treatment are his familiarity with and accurate exposition of Edwards’s metaphysical writings (which were otherwise largely ignored until the end of the twentieth century). His major weakness is in separating Edwards’s metaphysics from the rest of his thought. Voegelin states that “his mystical and philosophical works are so unconnected that it is almost impossible to use Calvinism to understand the philosophy or the philosophy to understand the dogma...” Further, he notes that Edwards’s later works “carry mystical pantheism so far that the break with dogma cannot possibly be ignored.”6 This, in turn, leads Voegelin to attribute to Edwards the already-noted developments of pantheism and emphasis on personal experience at the expense of dogma that historically only occur much later in American religious thought. These changes in American religion are characteristic of the early nineteenth century rather than the early eighteenth century, and involve decades of work Freedom of the Will. Which, as will be pointed out below, was a fairly standard state of affairs for the times. 6 Eric Voegelin, “A Formal Relationship with Puritan Mysticism” in On the Form of the American