What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

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  Nothing I have read forbids my taking Edwards to be pre-Revolutionary, that is, to be feeling the tremors before the great upheaval he did not live to see. It came abruptly enough when it came to suggest that there were signs of imminent rebellion building for years, perhaps for a hundred years. There had been Puritan religious excitements before and throughout the Cromwell period, and Edwards might have believed the Great Awakening to be what it was in fact, the precursor of another revolution. Considering that New England was a population largely made up of near descendants of sympathizers with and collaborators in the first modern revolution, greatly augmented by refugees from the oppression that followed its collapse; considering that they had maintained the religious and intellectual culture of the revolutionaries, including extraordinarily high levels of literacy and an active press; considering that the population had grown so prodigiously from this base that it would inspire Malthus’s theory on the subject; considering that every Bible in English would remind them of the signal achievements of their ancestors—in light of all this, a breach with England, when it came, could only be about much more than the price of tea. The New Englanders had an illustrated martyrology depicting the ghastly deaths of many men and women they revered as saints and heroes. Oddly, their interest in this enormous volume, which in an earlier version influenced Shakespeare, is treated as another of their creepily unwholesome obsessions. It is in fact a carefully documented history with relevant source materials in Latin and Greek and in translation, which might usefully be consulted to establish the idea content of Puritanism, as it was once meant to justify and preserve it.

  Why did Edwards bring so much attention to these classic Puritan writers in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections? In his preface he alludes to a time when Satan “prevailed against New England, to quench the love, and spoil the joy of her espousals, about an hundred years ago.” This would be the Cromwell period, when the Commonwealth made England new, or when New England experienced a virtual independence from a government that was sympathetic in any case, or when it seemed that Puritan New and Old England, “both the Englands,” as one Cromwell period writer called them, would be, in effect, wed. The parliamentary government, therefore the Revolution in England, collapsed in part because of sectarianism. Cromwell and his Congregationalists fought two major battles against the Presbyterians. He won, of course, being Cromwell, but in such circumstances there is only loss. Edwards can see the fissuring that is taking place already within the present revival, accusations and animosities over how conversion is prepared for and experienced and how it should manifest itself in subsequent behavior. And then there are the skeptics, Bostonians and others, who are also Puritans, and who must be persuaded of the authenticity of these conversions and, more generally, must be made to accept that God is acting in bringing about this awakening. Edwards feels this revival to be of exceptional, historical significance, as his allusions to early Christianity, the struggle with Rome, as well as his use of the language of actual warfare make clear. So his intentions are, as he says, to address the question that most concerns both mankind as a whole and every individual person, the nature of true religion. Factionalism is for him both the degeneration of religion within the individual sensibility, and the collective effect of this degeneration on groups of individuals, for example, in the tendency of people to conform their behavior to the behavior of those around them. He identifies no adversary except, glancingly, Satan. He will not pass judgment on the spiritual state of individuals no matter what he thinks of their conduct. The covenant of grace leaves that mystery to God. Even one despairing over his own spiritual state must remember that “life in the winter is hid in the root,” in the words of Sibbes. This high Puritanism does not offer any final assurances. They did not believe in salvation by works, but they did believe that the effective will to lead a generous life was an indication that one was saved. In All Things for Good, Watson says, “The mercies of God work compassion to others. A Christian is a temporal saviour. He feeds the hungry, clothes the naked … Charity drops from him freely, as myrrh from the tree.”

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  Granting the impossibility of judgment in individual cases, including one’s own, Edwards does believe hypocrisy, self-deception, and the influence of Satan are active in this and any revival, tending to destroy the revival and to discredit religion. The only response is to make each person an honest and competent judge of the integrity, the graciousness, of her own experience, of his own soul.

  I have no idea what the relation of the British authorities to the colonial press was when Edwards wrote. I know that in the nineteenth century, during the Chartist movement, which was the nearest Britain ever came to another civil war, a stamp act was used to put dissident publications out of circulation. An expensive stamp had to be affixed to each copy, so the readers to whom they were addressed could not afford to buy them. This seems more the sort of thing that would have offended the New Englanders than any mere tax on comestibles. A free press was characteristic of Reformed societies, notably Geneva, the Netherlands, and England during the reign of Edward VI and the Protectorship of the Earl of Somerset. Edwards’s allusion to the Commonwealth period, surely a touchy subject from an English point of view, is oblique. More generally, the question that comes to mind, reading the preface, is what is he trying to prepare his readers for? Cromwell’s great military success was largely due to his attracting an army of, in his words, “plain, russet-coated fellows,” ordinary, self-disciplined, reliable men who were unmoved by danger and hardship, godly men, in a term of the time, meaning Puritans in all their varieties. Edwards’s ideal is clearly much closer to such figures than to the enthusiasts whom he sees as in love with themselves and their “affections” rather than with God. He justifies his criticisms, which he knows “may be reproached in these captious, censorious times,” by summoning the voices of the Puritan golden age. His hope is to poise the awakening on the knife edge of zealous restraint. He quotes Flavel: “The more rational any gracious person is, by so much more is he fixed and settled and satisfied in the grounds of religion: yea, there is the highest and purest reason in religion; and when this change is wrought upon men, it is carried on in a rational way. Is. I:18, John 19:9.”

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  The great inducement to what Edwards would consider a true and ideal frame of religion, and the great standard of having reached it as well, is aesthetic experience. Puritanism is commonly thought of as averse to beauty because they rejected iconography, ornamentation, and personal display. This is a consequence of their seeing elements of idolatry in the religious use of images, of reaction against the costliness of churches in a world much afflicted by poverty, and of rejection of the sumptuary laws that made social status apparent in dress. These were responses to popular criticisms current since the fourteenth century at least. Simultaneous with this outward austerity, if that is the right word, is a celebration of the intrinsic beauty that is the signature of God in creation. Shepard says, to find God, “O, pass by all the rivers, till thou come to the spring head; wade through all creatures until thou art drowned, plunged and swallowed up with God.” It is crucial that the unmediated perception of the divine, that most glorious and most inward human privilege, is an aesthetic experience. Edwards says, “He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fullness of all things, without which the world is empty, no better than nothing, yea, worse than nothing. Unless this is seen, nothing is seen, that is worth the seeing: for there is no other true excellency or beauty. Unless this be understood, nothing is understood, that is worthy of the noble faculty of understanding.” And he says, “God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ’em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty. They therefore see the stamp of this glory in divine things, they see divinity in them, they see God in them, and so see ’em to be divine; because they
see in them wherein the truest idea of divinity does consist. Thus a soul may have a kind of intuitive knowledge of the divinity of the things exhibited in the gospel … the argument is but one, and the evidence direct; the mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but by one step, and that is its divine glory.” This experience gives the person who receives it a “spiritual knowledge” that “primarily consists in a taste or relish of the amiableness and beauty of that which is truly good and holy; this holy relish is a thing that discerns and distinguishes between good and evil, between holy and unholy, without being at the trouble of a train of reasoning.” It shapes the conduct of saints in the world: “There is such a thing as a divine taste, given and maintained by the Spirit of God, in the hearts of the saints, whereby they are in like manner led and guided in discerning and distinguishing the true spiritual and holy beauty of actions; and that more easily, readily and accurately, as they have more or less of the Spirit of God dwelling in them.” Conduct so derived and guided will be sweet, humble, meek, and charitable. Edwards’s purpose is to protect a tradition of Protestant inwardness that, on the strength of the exalted human capacity it recruits to a direct perception of this most sacred beauty, can claim to participate in essential cosmic reality. This is the definitive experience, over against which all other religious experience is exposed as false or feigned or misguided. It is based in a discipline of self-scrutiny that would shield it from every pressure, including the tendency toward enthusiasm and degeneracy Edwards sees around him.

  A striking difference between the kind of thinking about human nature and experience that one finds in Edwards and his tradition on the one hand and modern thinking on the same subjects on the other is that the older thought invites assent. Readers are implicitly invited to consult with themselves as to the persuasiveness of the description of the inward life that is offered to them. The forcefulness of the prose in these passages is meant to stir recognition. Is it possible to assent to the idea of a beauty that exceeds any conception we have of beauty? Is the moral and religious sense an aesthetic sense, as unmediated in its reactions as taste? The meaningfulness of the questions themselves would await affirmation by individual responses to them, and the differences of response would themselves be meaningful. That we live in and with our minds differently from one another is a given of Puritan theology. That we can experience our own minds differently from one moment to the next is also a given. In the understanding of Edwards’s tradition, these things are true because the mind is in intimate relation to God, stirred by conscience, accepting or resisting grace. The Puritan scheme can be deeply sensitive to shadings, variable responses to the essential and immutable. In The Bruised Reed, Sibbes says, “We must acknowledge that in the covenant of grace God requires the truth of grace, not any certain measure; and a spark of fire is fire, as well as the whole element. Therefore we must look to grace in the spark as well as in the flame. All have not the like strong, though they have the like precious, faith…” A glimpse of incomparable beauty has all the authority of a vision of it.

  In any case, we do indeed differ in the character of our experience, person to person and moment to moment. Our modern anthropologies have no language to account for complexity and mutability, nor for conscience or aesthetic sense as experience. If a theory of consciousness cannot address primary aspects of consciousness, it should not claim to have supplanted a more sufficient conceptual language, certainly not by treating the complexity that conceptual language reflects as if it were nonexistent. That these richer terms have always implied a metaphysics raises other questions to be dealt with in their own right, but which do not in any case impinge on the question of the meaningfulness of words like conscience, mind, and self.

  This recent anthropology is an instance of the phenomenon I spoke of earlier, the emergence of devouring voids, with their potent tendency to generalize emptiness. The center of Puritan individualism was the conscience, so sacred that it was the foundation of their definition of freedom. The much-revered William Ames, Shakespeare’s contemporary, says, “Conscience bindeth according as it is informed of the will of God: for in itselfe it hath the power of a will of God, and so stands in the place of God himselfe,” and “Conscience bindeth a man so straitly that the command of no creature can free a man from it,” and “The conscience is immediately subject to God, and his will, and therefore cannot submit itselfe unto any creature without Idolatry.” Flavel says, “View the conscience and thoughts with their self-reflective abilities, wherein the soul retires into itself, and sits concealed from all eyes but his that made it, judging its own actions, and censuring its estate; viewing its face in its own glass, and correcting the indecencies it discovers there: things of greatest moment and importance are silently transacted in its council-chamber between the soul and God; so remote from the knowledge of all creatures, that neither angels, devils, nor men can know” what is transacted there. The conscience is enlightened by acceptance of the Gospel, according to Ames, but a Law of Nature or a Law of God “is naturally written in the hearts of al men.” His essay, he says, is offered “that I might do something, whereby the unlearned, and such as are destitute of better helpe, might somewhat be helped.” This suggests Shakespeare’s audience, the literate unlearned, that remarkable population to whom Shakespeare as well as these popular theologians could speak so brilliantly and with such confidence. I have been reading the classic Puritans to understand Edwards’s spiritual and intellectual world. But clearly they are at least as relevant to an understanding of the whole literature of the English Renaissance. The workings of the conscience are a primary interest of Shakespeare’s drama, where the word conscience recurs frequently. He can always reasonably be supposed to share and address the interests of his audience, without presuming to identify his religious thinking or his politics.

  Let us say that conscience, like soul or mind, is socially constructed, the product of a particular cultural history. Or let us say it has the kind of reality conceded when a certain part of the brain lights up in an experimental subject who summons a guilty memory. In either case, there is nothing in the experience that anchors it in unequivocal meaning. Ames, in his treatise on the conscience, says that “conscience, though erroneous, bindes alwaies so, that he that doth against it, sinnes. The reason is, because he that doth against conscience, doth against Gods will: though not materially, and truley; yet formally, and by interpretation: because what the conscience doth declare, it declareth as God’s will.” So even while the fallibility of the conscience is granted, its sanctity as a mediator between the mind and God is so great that one sins in doubting or disregarding it. To bring such seriousness to the negotiation of one’s moral and ethical life might interfere with good times as currently defined. But on the one hand it invites the highest degree of interest in and respect for the singular experience of oneself and one’s circumstances, and on the other it can somewhat supplant the fear of hell as an inducement to seeking a relationship with God. Shepard says, “It is not a slavish fear of hell” that converts people, who “abhor to live like slaves in Bridewell, to do all for fear of the whip.” He goes on to describe the terrors inflicted by an offended conscience, true. But a troubled conscience is one’s own, defending one’s integrity and moral competence, perhaps rescuing one’s soul. It had a central place in the strenuous drama of Puritan life.

  Whether the conscience is or was indeed only a social construct is the kind of thing that will never be established finally one way or the other. But for purposes of argument, let us say this is a correct understanding of it. We know it can require different behaviors in different cultures, and we know that the Puritan conception was supported by an antiauthoritarianism that made them dissenters, nonconformists, and revolutionaries. It is the lynchpin of the kind of spiritual autonomy that came with the rejection of priestly confession and absolution, together with other rites and mediations of the Catholic Church. These rejections had been current in suppressed popular religious belief in England at l
east since John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, so their implications were well thought out by the seventeenth century and were central to a tradition whose heroes of conscience are memorialized in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of the Martyrs. It is clear that the concept had a powerful formative history for Puritans, which would differentiate their understanding of it from others in fundamental ways. To this extent it is certainly socially constructed. In all its variant forms it has had great importance in Western civilization, as have mind, self, and soul, which, despite their great potency as ideas, are now regarded as mere constructs.