Jonathan Edwards

Scholars have often noted the central importance to Jonathan Edward's thought of the sense of the heart, the special knowledge of spiritual matters possessed by the saint. Harold Simonson characterizes the sense as summarizing Edward's whole system of thought; and John E. Smith proposes that "no idea in all of Edwards' works is more original and no doctrine was more far reaching in its influence upon the course of Puritan piety." Discussion of the term focuses generally upon its illustrating several of Edwards' debts: to the Cambridge Platonists, particularly John Smith and the theory of spiritual sensation; to Francis Hutcheson and his treatise on the moral sense; and finally to John Locke and the sensationalist psychology. The last topic occasions perhaps the most extensive discussion, and the contention that the sense refers primarily to Locke's account of the origin of simple ideas has wide acceptance, in large measure because of Perry Miller's life of Jonathan Edwards' mind.

Miller took pains to convince his readers that Jonathan Edwards' thought could best be defined as "Puritanism recast in the idiom of empirical psychology" (p. 62). Edwards, accordingly, spoke in the terminology of traditional Calvinism but meant something quite different --the empiricism of Newton and Locke. His writings were thus cryptic, and the key to their understanding, Miller argued, is to read them with the Essay in mind. Grace, for instance, as an historical concept received little elucidation in Miller's account; he was interested mainly in establishing that Edwards had translated the doctrine into the language of Locke. It was "a new simple idea"; any significance in its similarity to the traditional Calvinist doctrine paled before Ed wards' striving to "emancipate Protestantism from the windingsheet of the Middle Ages (p. 256). The sense of the heart was above all else, Miller pronounced, "a perception, a form of apprehension derived exactly as Locke said mankind gets all simple ideas, out of sensory experience" (p. 139). By not discussing the sense of the heart apart from the new psychology, Miller gave the impression that the term derived solely from Jonathan Edwards' reading of Locke and that it constituted an essentially new explanation of spiritual knowledge.

Conrad Cherry protested Miller's encouragement of in appreciation for Jonathan Edwards "at points other than where traditional Calvinist tenets receive extensive treatment," maintaining instead that Edwards reclaimed a view of faith more central to early Calvinism than to Newtonian science. Locke's theory that the mind was a simple entity possessing the powers of intellection and volition explained, as the old faculty psychology could not, how it was that the act of faith was, as indeed Calvinism had taught, a response of the whole man. In Cherry's view the sense is, however, a Lockean "simple idea," an elemental sensation consisting of "the harmonious interpenetration of the cognitive and volitional powers of the human agent" (p. 18 ). Locke's psychology, and in particular the theory of the sense, enabled Jonathan Edwards in other words, to avoid the trap which had ensnared the early Puritan theologians, namely that of emphasizing alternately the intellect and then the will, in what supposedly was a single, unified experience (p. 13 ).

Recently William J. Scheick has remarked, quite correctly, that such expressions as the sense of the heart and the sensible effects of grace are not unique to Jonathan Edwards; they, the term inward sweetness, and the image of honey, by which the latter is often represented, appear frequently in early Puritan writings, so that "the presence of these expressions in Edwards' work, consequently, cannot be readily attributed, as Perry Miller suggests, to Locke's influence." Sense as a designation for faith and knowledge of the heart enjoyed notable currency among seventeenth-century Puritans.