Mere and Arbitrary Grace: Jonathan Edwards
This uneasy, unceasing, and almost involuntary return to the question of justice, haphazard as it might appear, nonetheless represents, to my mind, one of the most interesting claims of Christian theology, a claim it rarely makes now but which perhaps it should: namely, as a corrective to the bloodless placidity of philosophy. Susan Warner is most interesting when seen against this claim, although, needless to say, she is hardly alone here. I want to suggest, indeed, that she is in the company of none other than Jonathan Edwards,[107] her intellectual forebear in numerous ways: not only as a theologian who has something to say to philosophers but also as one who hones his analytic skill on the phenomenon of love, on its positive manifestation and, more vexingly still, on its negative expression, on the problematic justice of dislike, disinclination, sheer aversion, both human and divine.
Going on for pages and pages in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Edwards, too, said things that would have made Luther turn in his grave. "The essence of all true religion lies in holy love," Edwards wrote, and not tepid, run-of-the-mill love either, but "earnest desires, thirstings and pantings of soul after God, delight and joy in God, a sweet and melting gratitude to God for his great
goodness."[108] Indeed, "in nothing, is vigor in the acting of our inclinations so requisite, as in religion; and in nothing is lukewarmness so odious."[109] "Inclination," far from being a wayward or brutish phenomenon, turns out to be the very "vitals, essence, and soul" of the Christian religion, and, as such, it has a special place in Edwards's lexicon. The sensations of "pleasedness or displeasedness, inclination or disinclination" are native to all of us, Edwards said, for the soul
does not merely perceive and view things, but is some way inclined with respect to the things it views or considers; either is inclined to 'em, or is disinclined, and averse from 'em. . . . [T]he soul does not behold things, as an indifferent unaffected spectator, but either as liking or disliking, pleased or displeased, approving or rejecting. This faculty is called by various names: it is sometimes called the inclination : and, as it has respect to the actions that are determined and governed by it, is called the will : and the mind , with regard to the exercises of this faculty, is often called the heart .[110]
Stuck in a theological treatise, this passage must nonetheless stand as one of the most remarkable moments in the history of Western philosophy. Unlike Locke before him, with his complex and endlessly qualifying distinction between "preference" and "volition,"[111] and unlike Kant after him, with his relatively uncomplex and sharply categoric opposition between "will" and "inclination," Edwards here simply announced that inclination and will are one and the same thing, different names assigned to the selfsame faculty engaged in different activities. There is no ontological distinction between the two, only a nominal distinction. Indeed, not only are "will" and "inclination" here fused into the same substance, but, if anything, it is inclination that is prior to will, inclination that is determinative of will, for it is "our inclination that governs us in our actions," so that in every "act of the will, wherein the soul approves of something present, there is a degree of pleasedness; and that pleasedness, if it be in a considerable degree, is the very same with the affection of joy or delight. And if the will disapproves of what is present, the soul is in some degree displeased, and if that displeasedness be great, 'tis the very same with the affection of grief or sorrow."[112]
Edwards could not have known about the "indifferent unaffected spectator" so important to Kant and, in our own century, to John Rawls, but he seems to be refuting their arguments ahead of time, in
suggesting that such a liberty of indifference—such a principle of impartial, dispassionate rationality—is strictly an illusion, a vain and presumptuous dream, since our will does not act outside of our inclination and our reason does not deliberate prior to our affect. What follows, then, from this priority of affect, is thus a radically preferential universe, in which rational deliberations are always retroactive, always subsequent to arbitrary inclinations, so that moral judgment itself turns out to be no more than a function of our initial likes and dislikes.[113]
Unfortunately, the priority of affect over reason governs not only human judgment but divine judgment as well. Edwards's God is a God who judges always out of the "disposition of his heart."[114] He "may have a real and proper pleasure or happiness in seeing the happy state of the creature; yet this may not be different from his delight in himself; being a delight in his own infinite goodness . . . and so gratifying the inclination of his own heart."[115] That divine inclination means that there will always be invidious distinctions in the world, for there are things "God reserves only for those who are the objects of his special and peculiar love," just as there are things he "bestows on those for whom he has no love, but whom he hates."[116] And since God "best knows his own heart," and since "it would be relying too much on reason to determine the affair of God's last end,"[117] divine affect must always remain a human mystery, at once in excess of and perhaps even antithetical to human comprehension, forever unaccountable and arbitrary from our human point of view. What does it mean not to be beloved of God? What does it mean to be an object of his dislike, disregard, special aversion? Edwards's theology offers no explanation, just as it offers no consolation. If "love is the key" to his thinking, as Alan Heimert and Norman Fiering have persuasively argued,[118] that fact must be understood to carry its particular curse as well as its particular blessing, its darkness as well as its radiance. It leads not only to the ecstatic but relatively obscure sermon, "Heaven Is a World of Love," but also to the far better known "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," both logical expressions for a world permeated by divine preference.
Still, dubious blessing that it was, it was within this language of love—this cruelly arbitrary language of divine preference—that Edwards was able to articulate something like a principle of tolerable arbitrariness, an oddly earthbound, oddly nontranscendent per-
spective that, to my mind, represents the most powerful challenge of eighteenth-century theology, a challenge to political philosophy then and now. This takes the form of some remarkably compressed but also remarkably suggestive passages, in The Nature of True Virtue (1765), about the nature and limits of justice. Significantly, those passages occur in a chapter entitled "Concerning the Secondary and Inferior Kind of Beauty," because that is where justice stands in Edwards's ethical thought: among the secondary and the inferior. "This secondary kind of beauty," Edwards said, "consist[s] in uniformity and proportion,"[119] so that
there is a beauty in the virtue called justice , which consists in the agreement of different things that have relation to one another, in nature, manner, and measure: and therefore is the very same sort of beauty with that uniformity and proportion which is observable in those external and material things that are esteemed beautiful. There is a natural agreement and adaptedness of things that have relation one to another, and a harmonious corresponding of one thing to another: that he which from his will does evil to others should receive evil from the will of others . . . in proportion to the evil of his doings.[120]
Justice, as Edwards represents it in this astonishing analysis, turns out to be an aesthetic phenomenon: it has to do with our appreciation of beauty, especially the beauty of form, the beauty which comes from "uniformity and proportion." It is this formal aesthetics that underlies our language of desert,[121] our insistence on retribution and recompense, as a guaranteed relation of proportionality between crime and punishment, merit and reward. Our attraction to justice, from this perspective, is no different from our attraction to the "beauty of squares, and cubes, and regular polygons in the regularity of buildings, and the beautiful figures in a piece of embroidery." It is also no different from those other attractions in having no ultimate claim to ethical primacy, for, being no more than "a relish of uniformity and proportion," "this beauty, considered simply and by itself, has nothing of the nature of true virtue."[122]
Justice, the cornerstone of political philosophy, is considerably less than a cornerstone in Edwards's ethics, which, because it is not founded on the morality of reason or even on the aesthetics of form, must face up to its own insufficiency, its lack of an adequate justificatory ground—an inadequacy which, if not exactly reassuring, is perhaps more genuinely humane. And it is on the basis of that consti-
tutive lack of adequation that Edwards defines "true virtue" as a self-consciously asymmetrical relation of the finite to the infinite: as our "consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in general."[123] Consent is not so much an alternative to justice as an intimation that justice is not all, an intimation that its language is only one way (and perhaps an unduly aesthetic way) to think about the world, that it might not fully express or exhaust what it is that we most want for ourselves, and what it is that we are sometimes capable of giving to others. Locating the limits of justice at the limits of human reason, limits that are part concession, part celebration—concession, because our reason does not always prevail, and celebration, because that failure is a tribute to what is in excess of it—Edwards gestures toward a world in which the language of justice must always contend with the unceasing, ungrammatical language of love.