Jonathan Edwards: A Life (review)

The life-and-times approach is a hardy staple of the biography genre. It shares with the traditionally popular bildungsroman not only a commanding outlook on the personal development of its human subject from birth onward but also a sweeping overview of the places and temporal circumstances in which this person strove to discover individual purpose and possibly some larger meaning to life. Both types of story offer deity-eyed prospects, at once hypnotically familiar and strange, where readers watch a life pass before their eyes. The experience amounts to a privileged preview, as it were, of the life-survey commonly said to occur at our dying hour, which is a tad late for most of us.

The life-and-times biography excels in documenting what someone actually did while in the world and, as well, under what circumstances he or she lived. It generally is much less acute in rendering its subject's inner life. But, then, our inner lives tend to be provocatively elusive. "Why even I myself," Walt Whitman wrote in a poetic critique of a popular life-and-times biography, "know little or nothing of my real life."We all know that feeling. Such subtle self-estrangement aside, there are also those who either accidentally or purposefully leave behind little, if anything, of their private thoughts and feelings. When this happens, there is a virtual absence of, as Whitman aptly put it, even "a few hints, a few diffused faint clews," to the radical welter of that particular person's innermost sentiments.

As someone whose emotional life has largely remained obscure, Jonathan Edwards is an ideal figure for a life-and-times biography. In spite of a diary, a personal narrative, and letters—little of which go deep—Edwards remains a public presence, so defined by his time and place that it is difficult to detect a life that entailed much more than the daily thirteen-hour labor in the study and the pulpit. It is hard to imagine that somewhere in that dogged routine and rigorous pursuit of purpose there was time or inclination to father 11 children. Whether by design or accident, Edwards has, like Benjamin Franklin, concealed much about his inner person. And although different periods of American history have refashioned the cultural meaning of these two historical celebrities, both men have for some time effectively determined posterity's public impression of them—which, when you think about it, is quite a trick to pull off.

In his portrait of Edwards, George M. Marsden hopes to reconstruct something of this lost emotional record by depicting his subject "as a real person in his own time" (2). The phrase "in his own time" is indicative. It points to the biographer's intention to identify this early American theologian specifically in relation to the feelings and behavior of a typical person of Edwards's contemporary social rank and experience. Specifically, Marsden directs his readers to think "about Edwards as an eighteenth-century figure and about how that context should shape their understanding of him" (2). He eschews the example of Perry Miller, "who let his creativity get the best of him in his biography of Edwards" (60–61). Moreover, in order to be "objective in the sense of fair-minded and true to the evidence," Marsden explains, "I have tried to tell the story of Edwards and his family with relatively few interpretive intrusions" (5). In short, the biographer hopes for the fullest possible life-and-times biography, a densely packed synthesis of everything presently known about early American experience as it sheds light on this most outstanding of our colonial theologians.

Marsden achieves this worthy goal masterfully. His synthesis of old and new approaches to Edwards, including the most recent re-readings of the bad-book episode, are wonderfully blended together with the latest historical disclosures about the colonies in general and Northampton (with its three taverns) in particular. Only the numerous notes at the back of the book reveal the remarkable...