Puritan Rhetoric: The Issue of Emotion in Religion

Preface

Preface In preparing this volume I have wished to interest a broader spectrum of readers than those concerned with Puritans or with rhetoric-even than those who seek keys in the past to unlock the inner secrets of the present. What is discussed in these pages is so identifiable with the present confrontations between reason and emotion that-with suitable interpolations -one may read here a living dialogue between the forces of quasi-static rationalism and revolutionary anti-intellectualism. My hope is that the general reader may be encouraged to seek here for insights concerning man's continuing problems of ad~ justing his nature and his needs to the perplexities of his environment. One of the tasks of Part One is to introduce the Puritan as a surprisingly contemporary figure and to translate «the issue of emotion in religion" in some of its broader implications. Other tasks are equally important: to explain how society worked itself into such a position that a resisting conservatism was inevitably assaulted by an aggressive counterforce; to interpret how the precarious balance which the founding Puritans maintained be~ tween reason and emotion-as manifested in their rhetoric, theology, and psychology-came to be disrupted by the Great Awakening, the most important social movement in the Colonies prior to the Revolution; to unfold how in New England the confrontation between the rationalists and the revivalists split the society, sending shock waves through the centuries. In ad~ dressing these tasks, I have attempted to apply something of a new approach and, in addition to meeting the requirements of the non-specialists, to contribute some new conceptualizations which may yield at least a fragmental increment to existing scholarly knowledge. xii Preface The second part of the volume consists of five speeches with headnote introductions and interrogative notes. The speechesmost of which are here given their first readily accessible modern printing- illnminate the stages of the Awakening and the confrontations among the protagonists. The first reading is a revival sermon of Jonathan Edwards, "Future Punishment," possibly the finest example of tenor preaching in our literature. At the time this speech was delivered, April 1741, the revivalists were in dominion, the revolution against conservative rationalism in religion was appmaching its peak in intensity. and the opposition was muted. The next two speeches represent an oblique apposition between the chief protagonists of the revival. In one of these- "Distinguishing Marks," delivered in the fall of 1741 during the Yale commencement observances-Edwards defended the dominant role of emotion in religion and launched a confident attack upon the yet silent opponents of the revival. By the follOwing year, emotional excesses had brought the Great Awakening into disrepute among the conservatives. During the Harvard commencement proceedings of 1742, Charles Chauncy delivered "Enthusiasm Described and Caution'd Against," in which he defended the traditional, controlled balance between reason and emotion, delivered the first major blast at the new emphasis upon emotion, and, implicitly, gave forewarnings of the polarization of positions yet to come. In the last brace of speeches, Edwards "confronts" his foremost opponent of the post-Awakening period, Ebenezer Gay. Chastened by the excesses of the revival and by the rising tide of opposition, Edwards was quietly persuasive in his lecture,«The Nature of the Affections." In this sermon, he argued that emotion is the substance of religion and that man cannot respond to God through the agency of a dispassionate objective intellect. The entire man must hecome involved-spontaneously and completely. In striking contrast to Edwards, and in antipodal opposition to revivalists who went well beyond Edwards in decrying reason and exalting emotion, Gay's lecture, «Natural Religion, as Distinguished from Revealed," represented the ultimate position of the Congregational antirevivalists: both re- Preface xiii vealed andnaturaI religion are rational in character, the emotions having no substantive role in religion. Thus our speeches illustrate that the traditional balance between reason and emotion was upset and that New England society was divided into two camps: the revivalists who endorsed the emotional involvement of the entire man in religiOUS matters and the antirevivalists who denegrated emotion, exalted reason, and viewed the intellect as an ohjective, distant regulator which -like a sluice gate-interposed its impersonal control between man and the flow of spontaneous response. To provide levers for opening up the speeches, I have supplied interrogative notes, which are suffixed to each selection and which are conceptually cued to running citations in the...