"In Love with the Image": Transitive Being and Typological Desire in Jonathan Edwards

Perhaps there is not one leaf of a tree, nor spire of grass, but what has effects all over the universe, and will have to the end of eternity.

—Jonathan Edwards, 1721

I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.

—Walt Whitman, 1855

It seems a long time now since someone has reminded us that the Jonathan Edwards of the vast, mystical private notebooks inhabited a joyous, God-filled universe of plenitude and desire, of divine intimacy and human physicality—a universe whose jubilant tone would ring with as much familiarity in Walt Whitman's Transcendentalist cosmos as in Emily Dickinson's Calvinist one. But then, there are many Jonathan Edwardses. The enormous scope of this eighteenth-century divine's erudition, public and personal writings, and historical influence makes him a crucial and controversial figure to students of American history, philosophy, theology, and literature alike. Laid claim to so stridently by so many (and for so long—the process of dividing up Edwards's intellectual legacy began shortly after his death in 1758), Edwards's identity as cultural icon and architect of the American mind is still up for grabs; the internecine debates initiated by Perry Miller in the middle of the last century continue unabated about whether Edwards the thinker was primarily indebted to the Enlightenment or to Calvinism and the Bible; whether he was a synthesizer or inventor; whether he was the last Puritan or the first modernist, a postmodernist or a medievalist.¹

Curiously, however, while scholars of American history and religion have entered the new millennium with a spate of fine books that make significant advances toward establishing once and for all the originality of Edwards's biblicism and metaphysics and his lasting contributions to both transatlantic and historical theological communities—a renaissance happily coinciding with the increased speed of publication of the final volumes of the Yale Works of Jonathan Edwards and the marking of Edwards's 300th birthday—literary scholars have fallen strangely silent concerning Edwards's concomitant achievements as a writer and his place in the American literary canon.² As Philip F. Gura observes in a recent Early American Literature review essay of the Yale Works series, there are multiple possible reasons why, as new a generation of scholars, we have failed to engage Edwards as literary artist; these include the excision of all but one of Edwards's most atypical sermons from undergraduate anthologies, the theoretical focus on matters of race, class, gender, and sexuality (areas that do not seem immediately pertinent to considerations of Edwards) in graduate schools during the past 10 years, and, indeed, the broader problem for early Americanists of finding postmodern, postcolonial ways to relevantly explore Puritan writings—and their inherent religiosity—as literature per se.

One place to begin is by revisiting Edwards's typology. Certainly, since Perry Miller's twentieth-century revivification of Edwards, literary scholars have embraced the notion that the great figural construction in Edwards's work is natural typology, the device he contrived to bridge the gap between felt, mystical, and corporeal experience (or "affective knowledge," as he phrased it) and the realization of those experiences as mediated by language. But what the sheer breadth of the now 23 volumes of sermons, treatises, notebooks, and personal writings that comprise the Works series further demonstrates is that the greater part of Edwards's theology and philosophy is directly related to this typological mindset.³ Moreover, his language-based methodology for the creation of types is far more complex than has been supposed from earlier readings of the natural types as precursors to the symbolic Correspondences of American Transcendentalism.⁴ What literary scholars have to offer the broader scholarly Edwards community at this juncture is an approach to Edwards's typology that is concerned with revealing the way his sophisticated awareness of the operations of language (as revealed in the function of the types) directly affects...