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The Melancholy Saint: Jonathan Edwards's Interpretation of David Brainerd as a Model of Evangelical Spirituality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

David L. Weddle
David L. Weddle
Affiliation:
Cornell College
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Extract

It often happens that the papers of a departed master are gathered and winnowed by a faithful disciple in search of one last harvest of truth: an act of respect mingled with a desire for reflected glory. But in Jonathan Edwards's editing of the diary of David Brainerd the elder served the younger.

Type
Research Articles
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , July 1988 , pp. 297 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988

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References

1 This episode is recounted in detail by Norman Pettit in his introduction to The Life of David Brainerd, vol. 7 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985Google Scholar) 42–51. (Future references to this work will be included within parentheses in the text.) Pettit provides evidence that Brainerd's critical enthusiasm was entirely consistent with public attacks on “hypocrites” by leaders of the revival, including James Davenport, and Edwards himself.

2 Cf. Alridge, Alfred O., Jonathan Edwards (New York: Washington Square, 1964Google Scholar) 43: “For the entire Edwards family Brainerd was the exemplar of a saint and a Christian hero.”

3 Pettit notes that, despite the legend of doomed love between them, “there is no direct reference to Jerusha throughout the diary,” and “no romance in the text” (“Introduction,” Life, 67–71).

4 “Funeral Sermon for David Brainerd,” in Pettit, ed., Life, 553–54.

5 Dru, Alexander, ed., The Journals of Kierkegaard (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959Google Scholar) 239.

6 Dwight, Sereno E., ed., “Diary,” in The Works of President Edwards (New York, 1829Google Scholar) 1. 81.

7 For a detailed analysis of differences between Edwards's self-understanding in his “Diary” and that expressed in the Personal Narrative, see Weddle, David L., “The Image of the Self in Jonathan Edwards: A Study of Autobiography and Theology,” JAAR 43 (1975) 70–83Google Scholar.

8 Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1940Google Scholar) 238.

9 Pettit, “Introduction,” Life, 15.

10 Conforti, Joseph, “Jonathan Edwards’ Most Popular Work: ‘The Life of David Brainerd’ and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture,” CH 54 (1985) 188–201Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., 200.

12 Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin, and Saxl, Fritz, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1964Google Scholar; Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprints, 1979) Part 1. The most recent survey of the literature has been undertaken by Jackson, Stanley W. in Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987Google Scholar). Jackson concludes with recent psychological and neurophysiological research in the unfinished quest for the genesis of melancholy.

13 Tillich, Paul, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952Google Scholar) 51 –56.

14 Personal Narrative, in Hopkins, Samuel, ed., The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1765Google Scholar) 23.

15 Erikson, Erik H., Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963Google Scholar) 249.

16 Richard R. Niebuhr refers to Brainerd as an example of the “dreading” state of mind: “Brainerd's picture of himself is that of a man who knows that if he admits he is in dread his dreading will grow more powerful” (Niebuhr, , “The Widened Heart,” HTR 62 [1969] 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

17 On the day before his class at Yale graduated without him, Brainerd wrote: “I find, though my inward trials are great, and a life of solitude gives ‘em greater advantage to settle and penetrate to the very inmost recesses of the soul, yet ‘tis better to be alone than incumbered with noise and tumult. I find it very difficult maintaining any sense of divine things while removing from place to place, diverted with new objects and filled with care and business. A settled steady business is best adapted to a life of strict religion” (218).

18 Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1978Google Scholar) 18, 32.

19 Ibid., 13.

20 David E. Stannard, in his otherwise judicious study, misjudges Brainerd's statements about death to be “the merely rhetorical and hollow repetitions of phrases that were becoming anachronistic,” while his assurances of the sweetness of heaven awaiting him smack of “self-righteousness, which Jonathan Edwards reports with approval” (Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change [New York: Oxford University Press, 1977Google Scholar] 151). It is true that Brainerd does not fear death in the way Stannard finds characteristic of earlier Puritan culture. Nevertheless, his longings for death so that he may serve God more fully are prompted by a profound anxiety to prove his own worthiness. At the very least, it seems unfair to call him self-righteous.

21 “The early Romantics sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do. The inability to realize these ideals of vitality and perfect spontaneity was thought to make someone an ideal candidate for T B “(Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 45).

22 The image is drawn from Richard R. Niebuhr's eloquent sermon on Matt 6:22 – 23 (Streams of Grace: Studies of Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William James [Kyoto: Doshisha University Press, 1983Google Scholar] 115–22). Niebuhr describes the “moral and spiritual sickliness of our being” as a “weakness of imagination, infirmity in our capacity to recognize ourselves in the world about us and to receive that world into ourselves.” The diagnosis fits Brainerd, whose indifference to nature is a symptom of spiritual illness. In Edwards's terms, Brainerd fails to delight in the excellency of being in general.

23 This title may be the most insightful part of a curious biography by Day, Richard E. (Philadelphia: Judson, 1950Google Scholar), which is distinguished by the outrageous thesis that Brainerd embarked on an imitation of Edwards, but was then led into excesses at the point where Edwards “abandons” Scripture as the basis of faith in favor of “inner light.” Brainerd's insensitivity to either romantic images or theological symbols which others discerned in nature is little better explained, however, by Pettit's observation (“Introduction,” Life, 2) that the sickly scholar-turned-missionary “disliked the wild because he hated the discomforts that living in the woods entailed.”

24 In a letter to the Rev. John Sargent, a missionary to the Housatonic Indians at Stockbridge, Brainerd confessed, “I have lately moved to have a colleague or companion with me, as my spirits sink with my solitary circumstances” (583).

25 In his fine survey of recent works on Edwards, James Hoopes emphasizes that the “new sense” of the regenerate is a divinely imparted faculty with its own “intellectual and emotional content” (“Jonathan Edwards's Religious Psychology,” JAH 69 [1983] 858Google Scholar).

26 Gerald J. Goodwin has demonstrated that there was no compromise with Arminianism among New England Calvinists, and Brainerd was no exception. Goodwin imagines a Puritan child reciting the catechism: “Persons are saved by Virtue of the electing Love of God; they say they are saved, because they rightly improve their own free will.” Thus the child learned the practical lesson: “Behaviour provided only evidence; it earned nothing” (Goodwin, , “The Myth of ‘Arminianism- Calvinism’ in Eighteenth-Century New England,” The New England Quarterly 41 [1968] 232CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Brainerd found no assurance in his work because he could not bring himself to trust the evidence that some good thing might, after all, lie in him.

27 In a separate paper which Edwards appended to the diary, Brainerd emphasizes that the godly soul chooses God “because of the excellency and amiableness he discovered in him; not from slavish fear of being damned if he did not, nor from base and mercenary hopes of saving himself, but from a just esteem of that beauteous and glorious object” (481).

28 Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 231.

29 Ibid., 108.

30 For a brief survey of treatises which most likely influenced Edwards's understanding of melancholy, see Parker, Gail Thain, “Jonathan Edwards and Melancholy,” The New England Quartery 41 (1968) 195–99Google Scholar.

31 “Letter to Thomas Gillespie,” in Goen, C. C., ed., The Great Awakening, vol. 4 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) 566Google Scholar. Daniel B. Shea, Jr., argues that Edwards consistently edited out references to melancholy in his writings about religious experience (Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968Google Scholar] 192–93). It is, then, all the more significant, as Pettit demonstrates (“Introduction,” Life, 22), that Edwards's editing of Brainerd's diary “did not disguise the melancholy tone of the text, nor did Edwards always try to disguise it.”

32 Cited in Smith, John E., ed., Religious Affections, vol. 2 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) 290Google Scholar. Edwards also notes what is known by “abundant experience,” that the “weakness of body and mind, and distempers of body, makes persons abundantly more susceptive of such impressions” (Life of Brainerd, 213). It was a common belief that melancholy was the occasion of “disturbing dreams and strange illusions” (Sena, John F., “Melancholy as Despair: Pope's Eloisa to Abelard,” HTR 76 [1983] 452Google Scholar). Klibansky, et al., trace the notion that melancholies are particularly capable of visions back to Aristotle, who attributes the power to the “vehemence” of their imaginations (Saturn and Melancholy, 34–36).

33 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1927Google Scholar) 3. 490.

34 Ibid., 3. 458, 394.

35 Goen, ed., Great Awakening, 162. Edwards understood the necessity of emphasizing this point since the disease of melancholy had driven his uncle to suicide during the 1735 revival. Edwards even went so far as to recommend that in private counseling with melancholies pastors should withhold “the most awful truths of God's Word,” lest the distressed sinners “murder themselves” (392 – 93). Indeed, melancholy had proven a chief strategem of Satan, leading souls, under the convictions of “legal terror,” into irredeemable despair. It was a demonic masterpiece whereby Godpleasing repentance was supplanted by a God-damned counterfeit.

36 Parker, “Jonathan Edwards and Melancholy,” 201.

37 Smith, ed., Religious Affections, 201.

38 Edwards notes in his appendix to the Life of Brainerd: “It is pretty manifest that Mr. Brainerd's going, as he did, alone into the howling wilderness, was one great occasion of such a prevailing melancholy on his mind; which was his greatest disadvantage. He was much in speaking of it himself when he was here in his dying state; and expressed himself to this purpose, that none could con ceive of the disadvantage a missionary in such circumstances was under by being alone; especially as it exposed him to discouragement and melancholy” (533–34).

39 Smith, ed., Religious Affections, 406–7.

40 From A. B. Grosart, ed., Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Jonathan Edwards, quoted by Goen, C. C., Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962Google Scholar) 46.

41 Alan Heimert argues that Edwards supported the plan as a way of chastening the “religion of the closet,” and as fulfilling his vision of a redeemed social order (Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966Google Scholar] chap. 3).

42 Frankena, William, ed., The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960Google Scholar) 8.

43 Ibid., 14.

44 The argument that beauty is the basis of Edwards's analysis of moral virtue is developed by Delattre, Roland in Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968Google Scholar). While there is much to appreciate in Delattre's sensitive study, I tend to agree with Norman Fiering's recent criticism of its primary thesis: “The moral perfection of willing (or loving or consenting to) the diversity of existence created and unified by God (called by Edwards excellency) is the primary quality in Edwards's ethical ontology, not beauty” (Fiering, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981Google Scholar] 81).

45 Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Delta, 1967Google Scholar) 295.

46 Faust, C. H. and Johnson, T. H., eds., Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections (New York: Hill & Wang, 1962Google Scholar) 56.

47 Goen, ed.. Great Awakening, 334 – 35.

48 Ibid., 335. Patricia Tracy notes that Edwards confessed his own inability to achieve the consistency and purity of his wife's piety. Yet in his Personal Narrative he “attributes to himself a blissful resignation to God's will” in language that seems drawn from Sarah's testimony (Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton [New York: Hill & Wang, 1980Google Scholar] 140). It is unfortunate that Edwards did not adopt Sarah's generous reluctance to judge others.