The Writings of Jonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 229 Aristotle; his general thesis concerning the structure of Hobbes's system is convincing. And we get a Hobbes placed in the context of seventeenth-century attempts to break free of Aristotelianism . The historical Hobbes is not lost here. PAUL J. JOHNSON California State College, San Bernardino The Writings ofJonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style. By William J. Scheick. (College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press, 1975. Pp. xiv + 162. $8.50) William Scheick proposes an interesting but somewhat modest thesis which yields mixed results: that Edwards's writings as a whole may be viewed as his progressive concern with interior life, and that as a preacher, a theologian and a scholar he was motivated by a personal need to know whether or not he was one of God's elect. Scheick's conclusion is that Edwards never answered to his own satisfaction the question of his conversion. Of far greater importance , however, he came to realize that the inner self, when infused with special grace is, next to Scripture, "the best revelation of divine reality." As a second and related purpose, the author considers the artistic dimensions of Edwards's style and technique as significant clues to his growing preoccupation with the self and with its extension in the family and in Puritan society as a collective self. In his analysis of style he is exceedingly effective, especially with the sermons, in demonstrating Edwards as a remarkably skilled craftsman. I found this to be the most rewarding part of the book. As for the principal thesis, the author probes into a neglected aspect of Edwards's life and thought and thereby adds to our understanding of this eighteenth-century genius. While he starts out with the intention of keeping his message in a balanced perspective, Scheick soon attempts to read everything, from the precocious essays on the mind and on being to the mature works on religious affections, the will, redemption, original sin, virtue and creation, exclusively as Edwards's incursions into the inner soul for evidence of his religious conversion. As a limited thesis it is basically sound. But exclusive emphasis on it leads at times to a distorted view of Edwards as a multifaceted thinker. For example, there is an important social dimension to his philosophy which is obscured in favor of seeing the family and society only as functions of the quest for self. Anyone dealing with Edwards in a systematic and comprehensive manner must come to terms in some fashion with Perry Miller. Scheick acknowledges Miller's "seminal work" and describes his own discussion as "less an attempt at a radical departure" and more as an "effort to develop further one other angle of vision from within the established context." And yet his claim that Edwards, in his exploration of the inner realm, was far from a precursor of modern thought, as Miller held, departs radically from that context. For Scheick Edwards was "a moderate with distinct conservative prejudices.., for the traditions of the Puritan past." Such an assertion compels him, so he thinks, to reject decisively the notion principally developed by Miller that Edwards was profoundly influenced by Locke and sought to re-establish Puritanism in the matrix of Lockean empiricism and Newtonian physics. Scheick states that Miller was not wrong but that "he merely overstated the case" in claiming a major role for Locke. Unfortunately, he offers only scant evidence to support this statement. In place of a well-reasoned and thoroughly documented argument, he merely observes that such important terms as the sense of the heart and the sensible effects of grace cannot be attributed to Locke because they were used by other Puritan writers as well. Then, in support of his charge that Miller was on even thinner ice in claiming that Edwards anticipated modern thought, he simply invokes the authority of Peter Gay, Mason Lowance and others for whom Edwards was a late medieval rather than an early modern thinker. To call 230 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Edwards the last medieval American, a conservative, a traditionalist, an orthodox Calvinist, and to imply an antipathy to modernism is nonsense. For one thing it betrays a lack of appreciation for the...