The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 59(1746), for instance, Edwards attempted to construct a clear theory of the place of
emotion in religion, so as to better to understand the emotional experience of con-
verts. Similarly, in A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of
that Freedom of Will, Which is Supposed to be essential to ... Praise and Blame (1754),
he made a conscientious effort to rescue philosophers from what he saw as their
confusion, while resolving the potential contradiction between the doctrines of
divine omnipotence and human responsibility. Just how much Edwards wanted to
harness reason in the service of faith and, if necessary, to defend mystery with logic
is nowhere better illustrated than in his arguments – developed in such works as The
Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758) and Two Dissertations
(1765) – concerning the total depravity of human nature and the infinite grace of
God. True virtue, Edwards argued, borrowing his definitions from Enlightenment
philosophers like Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, consists in disinterested benevolence
toward humankind in general. It involves pure selflessness. But, Edwards then
insisted, humanity can never be selfless. All human actions, no matter how creditable
their effects, are dictated by self-interest. Everything a human being does springs
from considerations of self because, Edwards went on, now borrowing his definitions
from an earlier Enlightenment figure, Descartes, he or she can never get outside the
self. A man, or woman, can never escape from their own senses and sense impressions.
So, they are incapable of true virtue. Each is imprisoned in his or her own nature.
Each is corrupt, fallen, and evil, and the only thing that can save them is something
beyond human power to control: that is, the irresistible grace of God. “All moral
good,” Edwards concluded, “stems from God.” God is the beginning and end, the
ground and meaning of all moral existence.
And not only moral existence: Edwards was careful to argue that God was the
ground of all created life, including our understanding of ourselves and our world.
“There is no identity or oneness in the world, but what depends on the arbitrary
constitution of the Creator,” he explained. This was because existence and our
knowledge of it depend on continuity, a connection between “successive effects”;
and such continuity “depends on nothing but the divine will” which, in turn,
“depends on nothing but the divine wisdom.” Without God, as Edwards saw and
argued it, the world and life not only became a moral desert; they also ceased to exist.
Edwards’s relation to the prevailing rationalism of his times certainly drew him
toward complex philosophical argument, the use of authorities like Descartes and
Locke, and the notion of the human being as a creature dependent on the impres-
sions of the senses. But it never tempted him to deviate from the straight and narrow
path of faith, or to surrender a vision of human experience that was rapt and apoca-
lyptic, swinging between the extremes of human impotence and divine power,
human unworthiness and divine grace and, above all, damnation and redemption.
A sermon like Edwards’s best-known piece of work, Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God, delivered in 1741 and published the same year, describes the alternative
of damnation. In it, Edwards uses all the rhetorical devices at his disposal, above all
vivid imagery and incremental repetition, to describe in gruesome detail the “fearful
danger” the “sinner” is in. “You hang by a slender thread,” he warns his flock, “withGGray_c01.indd 59ray_c 01 .indd 59 8 8/1/2011 7:54:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 56 AM