Jonathan Edwards, John Dennis, and the Religious Sublime: A Consideration of Edwardsean Terror

Summary

“And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning,” wrote Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), one of the most influential thinkers of colonial America, in his Personal Narrative describing his own religious experience. “Formerly, nothing had been so terrible to me. I used to be a person uncommonly terrified with thunder: and it used to strike me with terror, when I saw a thunderstorm rising. But now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God at the first appearance of a thunderstorm” (Edwards 1998: 794). Edwards is giving an account of his conversion and his Christian experience to serve as a model conversion narrative in the midst of the religious revivals in New England in the 1740's in which he was deeply involved as a pastor and theologian, defending the awakening while also trying to curb its extravagances. Most likely he would not have thought of describing this particular experience as sublime and it is also likely that he was not very much aware of the aesthetic debates about beauty, sublimity, poetic genius and imagination that occupied a number of English literary critics and thinkers of this period. Those authors, however, would have readily recognized such combination of terror and delight as sublime, a category of aesthetic experience which was receiving increasing attention.

Since the sublime was not only an important theme in 18^th-century philosophy, aesthetics, ethics and literary criticism but survives and thrives as a rich critical concept even today such an initial step as the one taken here in the direction of the sublime in Jonathan Edwards raises more questions than it answers. The step is made from the perspective of the history of literary criticism by using the work of John Dennis, English literary critic of the beginning of the 18^th century, focusing particularly on the intersection of the sublime and the religious.

Speaking of 18^th-century sublime it is necessary to limit the scope of the topic for the purposes of this paper. English interest in this new concept was aroused by the publication of the French translation, by Nicolas Boileau (1674), of the classical treatise Peri Hypsous, or On the Sublime by Longinus (1^st or 3^rd century A.D.; authorship unclear). The text discusses which characteristics of a literary work account for a grand style, what makes the work and its readers’ experience elevated above the ordinary.