Early American Literature

Prior to the pioneering work of Perry Miller, and even for some time after, the common estimation of Jonathan Edwards's place in American literature could tend toward oversimplification: the last great Puritan after Cotton Mather, Edwards produced "A Divine and Supernatural Light" (1734), the "Personal Narrative" (likely written in 1740, but first published in 1765) and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), along with any number of sermons and treatises that reiterated Puritan dogma at exhausting length; a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, Edwards represented a rigidly moralistic way of thinking, and a style of writing that Americans ultimately abandoned in favor of Franklin, Tom Paine, and Washington Irving. Notwithstanding this, and no doubt spurred on by Miller's reassessment of Edwards as a proto-Romantic predecessor of Ralph Waldo Emerson, his critical legacy has now come to be defined in large part by the works he produced following his dismissal from the Northampton pastorate of which he had assumed primary duties following the death of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. It is within the pages of these longer, and until relatively recently, long-neglected works—A Dissertation concerning the End for Which God Created the World (1765), A Dissertation concerning the Nature of True Virtue (1765), Freedom of the Will (1754), Original Sin (1758), and Religious Affections (1754)—that a far more sophisticated, and far more complex, Edwards begins to emerge.

Timely in its publication following the completion of Yale University Press's Works of Jonathan Edwards (1957–2008) and the veritable torrent of renewed scholarly attention in essays, dissertations, and book-length [End Page 745] studies that have been published in the last three decades, The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards is not surprisingly a highly detailed and comprehensive treatment of the multifaceted Edwards—the powerfully formative philosopher, theologian, pastor, and revivalist whose influence and legacy has yet to be sounded to its full depth. The 624-page volume is divided into four parts (Backgrounds, Sources and Contexts; Intellectual Labours; Religious and Social Practices; and Global Reception), and the second of these devotes over 200 pages to Edwards's "intellectual labours," including important chapters on pneumatology, ecclesiology, idealism, and occasionalism that exhibit the high level of scholarly activity and interest in the finer points of Edwards's theology and philosophy but will appeal mainly to ardent Edwardseans, theologians, and scholars working in these particular fields. That said, there is a fine counterbalance of chapters that are both accessible and illuminating, which begin to further reveal the peculiar splendor of Edwards's philosophical theology, his unique wit and eloquence, and his finely tuned aesthetic sense, on which his philosophy and understanding of human existence is centered. "Edwards is well known for the aesthetic orientation of his theology," Robert E. Brown reminds us, "from his divine ontology to the conversion experience to spiritual perception, the role and recognition of beauty was paramount" ("Biblical Exegesis" 381). Or, as William Dyrness and Christi Wells note in one of many fascinating insights throughout the book that place the theologian's thought and mode of expression firmly in his time and place, Edwards's "mention of a mortise and tenon joint or a piece of embroidery, framed by his discussion of secondary beauty, call to mind a world of high-boy chests and stitched samplers, rather than academic painting … yet beauty remained central to his thought" ("Aesthetics" 299).

Also noteworthy are the number of chapters that complicate or serve as a corrective to some of the well-worn narratives about Edwards's biography and character. As Ava Chamberlain observes, for example, "Biographers tend to disembody Edwards, portraying him as a fragile otherworldly man, painfully thin and sickly. But according to the markers of manhood that mattered most in colonial New England he was a potent and successful family patriarch" ("Family Life" 10). Likewise, in his wonderful chapter, "Parish Ministry," veteran Edwards scholar Harry S. Stout casts a new interpretive light on the infamous "Bad...