Jonathan Edwards, Continuity, and Secularism

One of the earliest and most persistent trends in literary and cultural studies of Jonathan Edwards has been the attempt to place Edwards within a lineage of American letters that indicates his influence on or consonance with later writers more comfortably situated within the various poetic and intellectual projects of "American literature" proper. Indeed, this task was clearly announced by Perry Miller in the title of his influential 1940 essay "From Edwards to Emerson," and despite many decades of objections to Miller's thesis (often as part of a larger rejection of any attempt to trace a lineage, or "continuity," between Puritan theology and American literature), new and recent work on Jonathan Edwards shows that the continuity project is alive and well. While these new studies retain many of the traditional strengths and weaknesses of continuity arguments, and often push the continuity thesis into new and interesting territory, they also point to urgent questions about exactly how new approaches to religion in literary and cultural studies will change the way we teach and write about Edwards in American literary and intellectual history. At stake is not only the persistence of an ideologically driven white Protestant account of American history but also the long history of misunderstanding Edwards and his tradition by forcing them into protonationalist narratives that are alien to their cultural and theological milieu.

A great example of the very old pedigree of this problem is Perry Miller's foundational work, The New England Mind (1939, 1953). Listen to Miller describing the Puritan understanding of sin: "Goaded by his appetite for happiness, man ranges over the world, glutting his senses with enjoyments which give no relief beyond the delusive moment; in his inability to find enduring comfort in a surfeit of pleasures man exhibits at once the desperateness of his present condition and the loftiness of his origin" (23). What makes this passage sound so Romantic is the total extraction of theological language of any kind—a bit of an odd move in a book purporting to take its readers inside a deeply theological "mind." When he comes a few pages later to explaining regeneration, Miller is more explicit about his orientation: "Other people have found other names for the experience: to lovers it is love, to mystics it is ecstasy, to poets inspiration" (25). The universalizing move of this explanation risks collapsing the distinctiveness of Puritan theology by suggesting that its terminology constitutes one possible (surface, artificial) interpretation of a (deeper, natural) foundational human experience. This move could be tolerable in itself as a comparativist project, but Miller's comparisons are placed within a teleological view of intellectual history that becomes clear in his discussion of Puritan views of nature at moments like this one: "The Puritan mind was not yet capable of separating the delight from the utility" (215). Miller is here treating Puritan writing as a group of ideas that should be extracted from their cultural forms and placed on a historical arc that progresses from befuddled (though complicated and admirable) theological views of the world to the sharp-eyed clarity of secular humanism's ability to specialize and dichotomize the world through rational human thought.

The point of this discursion into Miller's work is this: continuity treatments of Edwards and his Puritan tradition have tended not only to underwrite American literature with a white Protestant account of its sources (a familiar critique), but they have also tended to subsume those strongly religious sources within later...