into a strict Calvinism.
The political implications of these two opposing descriptions of the sublime help explain Edwards’s defense of extreme religious affect in two subsequent treatises, Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741) and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), that stand as theological companion pieces to his conversion narrative. In attempting to limit the power of affect to challenge existing ecclesiastical hierarchies of speech, Edwards’s sublime counterbalances evangelical speech by women, the young, the poor, and other marginal groups against the liberal humanist constructions of subjectivity that would also threaten ministerial power.
Because Kant’s theory of sublimity derived from his attempt to transform Burke’s political and aesthetic notion of sublimity into moral and idealistic concepts, a brief review of Burke’s differences with Edwards will help clarify the way in which Edwards’s political concerns contributed to his construction of sublimity. Burke and Edwards both develop Shaftesbury’s account of sublimity in “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (1707), which offers a limited endorsement of “divine enthusiasm” resulting from “ideas or images received [that] are too big for the narrow human vessel to contain” and used “to express whatever was sublime in human passions.”94 Sharing this common point of departure, Burke’s description of sublimity, which is frequently credited with offering the earliest description of pleasurable emotional pain, agrees with Edwards’s account of his painfully pleasurable sense of God’s power.95 Though rhetorically aligned in their description of sublime power, they differ in their evaluation of the source of pleasure. Burke’s illustration of sublimity as the sense of “shrink[ing] into the minuteness of our own nature” and being metaphorically “annihilated before [God]” closely resembles Edwards’s description of his response to God’s excellence.96 Burke’s path to sublime pleasure also resembles a notion of conversion as a singular, metamorphic “new birth,” or the emergence of a saintly self out of the destruction of the sinful self, in which the sense of God’s terrible power is transformed into rapturous joy through God’s grace. For Burke, however, this painful sense of power, which he calls terror, can delight only if its source is placed at some distance through active and strenuous exertion. Burke here follows Shaftesbury’s conclusion that only “enthusiasm” guided by “reason, and sound sense … sedate, cool, and impartial; free of every bypassing passion, every giddy Vapor, or melancholy fume,” can be judged as divine.97 Indeed, Burke’s account of sublimity may have been influenced by the political irregularity produced by affective revivalism in the 1740s: he began the treatise at Trinity College, Dublin, before 1749, and, in his later considerations of colonial self-government, was clearly skeptical of American enthusiastic religion. Edwards also follows Shaftesbury in endorsing rational judgment and encouraging converts’ increased self-control in their expressions of personal abjection. Edwards moves away from Shaftesbury by emphasizing that God’s power surpasses human judgment, and away from Burke by embracing the divine sublime and maintaining the accompanying sense of sublime power.
Burke, by describing sublime pleasure as the result of escape from divine power, presents a fantasy of self-creation through flight that provides an aesthetic framework for the construction of bourgeois liberal subjectivity in eighteenth-century England.98 Edwards’s sublime attempts to forestall a Burkean departure from his script by describing encounters with overwhelming divine power as pleasurable, thereby disallowing Burke’s path to self-creation. This difference helps account for Edwards’s refusal to reject even the most harmful performances of affect. What Burke and Shaftesbury condemn as the “horrid convulsions” of “languid and inactive … nerves” incapable of overcoming the source of terror, and what other anti-revivalists called “Visions, Trances, Convulsions [and] Epilepsies,” Edwards describes, in Some Thoughts, as being “weakened by strong and vigorous exercises of love” to Christ.99 In characterizing weakness and pain as “exercises of love,” Edwards embeds sublime pleasure in the experience of divine power and defends ministerial power against a specifically liberal threat emanating from the staging of the emergence of a gracious self.
Edwards’s opposition to Burke’s conception of the self as defined by a flight from overwhelming power is based on Edwards’s theological association of the phenomenological world with the fallen world. Edwards’s faith in biblical guidance and human corruption places more severe limits on human knowledge than most Enlightenment empiricists allow. Edwards takes up the language of sensation and sympathy only to argue that the “human” experience it produces is sinful and abject, not semi-divine. In so doing, his conversion narrative presents a challenge to the genre’s role in the development of modern liberal subjectivity, interrupting its development of an individuated psyche by repudiating the movement from “sinful” to “gracious” self. Edwards refutes emerging liberal descriptions of human nature as compatible with the divine by describing faith as the joyful acceptance of absolute human abjection and endorsing an affective, tearful experience of both personal abjection and God’s sovereignty. In this way, Edwards’s tears in his conversion narrative ambivalently refigure St. Francis’s blood. Both are shed in a sacrificial manner, but while St. Francis describes his experience to all who will listen, Edwards’s tears are accompanied by a retreat into meditative isolation and the more private realm of the letter. By adopting the individual affective experience of sorrow and selflessness to reestablish Calvinist uncertainty, Edwards conflates the affective realization of abjection with the joy of redemption.100
Edwards’s relationship to masochism’s Kantian foundations lies in his location of pleasure in the experience of weakness and overwhelming divine power. This relationship is complemented by his preemptive refusal to follow other Enlightenment writers, including Kant but especially Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson, in their development of the connection between affect, sympathy, and moral virtue.101 Edwards’s conversion narrative, in endorsing an affecting sense of God’s excellence and personal abjection, appears to promote a proto-masochistic pleasure in self-disruption by staging a proliferation of the desire for abjection and a loss of self-control. Edwards thereby seems to posit a religious subject whose desires are premised on the same logic that, as Marianne Noble argues, would structure the more “properly” masochistic pleasures of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature, in which the religious discourse of eroticized submission to the divine is gradually transformed into a secular discourse of transcendent erotic sub-mission.102 However, as Sandra Gustafson’s analysis suggests, Edwards has a more immediate and more vexed relationship to this sentimental literary tradition than Noble indicates.103 Edwards’s portraits of exemplary converts in the Faithful Narrative draw directly on English sentimentalism in its staging of scenes of death and suffering, and his conversion narrative adopts affect as a way of frustrating the development of a modern self, separable from God, for whom such suffering might be perverse.
The pleasurable affective experience of abjection that Edwards describes was in the process of becoming perverse through Enlightenment humanism’s promotion of common sense as the basis for moral action and social cohesion. Theories of common sense, as developed by Smith, Hutcheson, and others, propose that our innate sympathetic response to suffering, combined with our natural inclination toward pleasure and away from pain, will prompt us to alleviate suffering in others. Edwards, in contrast, proposes that such sympathy is dependent on divine blessing or grace. In the absence of grace, our sense of pity is determined by the discrepancy between the sufferer’s actual state and what we consider his or her proper state. Pity is thus a mode of judgment rather than a sensational or physical response. For example, Edwards’s discussion of “self-love” and “private affections” in his The Nature of True Virtue (1765) takes a middle path between Scottish Common Sense philosophers and cynics such as Bernard Mandeville. Edwards agrees that sympathy is a basis for society and moral virtue, but he follows Mandeville’s account of sympathy as governed by the extent to which the sufferer’s interests are aligned with the observer’s and that sympathetic pain may be mixed with pleasure.104 In following Mandeville’s proposal that sympathy produces an ambivalent reaction to others’ suffering, Edwards allows for Sade’s eroticization of suffering,
