Jonathan Edwards

In the winter of 1734 the congregation at Northampton, a farming town on the Connecticut river, began to change. Young people who had been indifferent became serious; conversions ran at a rate the minister had never seen; and for about half a year the town talked of little else. Edwards wrote it all down, carefully, with dates, numbers and case histories, including one of a four year old girl and one of a man who cut his own throat.

That account, published in London as a faithful narrative of the surprising work of God, did something no revival had done before: it gave the phenomenon a documented shape, with stages, and it circulated across the Atlantic. When far larger revivals broke out in 1740 and 1741 under George Whitefield and others, ministers on both sides of the ocean already had a template for recognising and describing them.

Edwards was the Awakening's chief defender against those who dismissed it as enthusiasm, and its most exacting critic when its supporters claimed too much. The sermon everyone knows, preached at Enfield in 1741, with the spider held over the fire, belongs to that period and is genuinely his, but it is one sermon of over a thousand and is a poor guide to the rest. His own congregation dismissed him in 1750, after twenty three years, in a dispute over who might be admitted to communion; he went to the frontier settlement at Stockbridge, preached to a mixed English and Mohican congregation, and wrote his major treatises there.

The question Edwards spent his life on is how to tell genuine religion from its imitations, and his answer, set out in the Religious Affections of 1746, is deliberately unhelpful to both parties in the revival quarrel. Intensity proves nothing: trembling, weeping, visions, sudden texts coming to mind, even great changes in behaviour, can all occur without grace. Nor does their absence disprove anything. The mark he settles on is a change of taste. A person given grace perceives the beauty of holiness directly, the way one perceives sweetness rather than being told about it, and comes to love God for what God is rather than for what God gives.

That aesthetic centre runs through everything he wrote. Being itself, in his metaphysics, consents to being, and beauty is that consent; virtue is love to being in general; and the created world is a communication of God's own fullness rather than a stage for a transaction. It sits oddly beside his reputation, and it is the reason philosophers still read him.

He was a strict Calvinist and argued the case at length in Freedom of the Will of 1754, which distinguishes natural from moral inability and remains the standard statement of the position in English. He also, like most of the New England clergy of his class, owned enslaved people, which is part of the record and is stated here as such. He became president of the college at Princeton in 1758 and died within weeks, of a smallpox inoculation he had taken to encourage the practice.