SCRIPTUM 7 SPIDER: Sinners at the Hands of An Angry God by Jonathan Edwards

The Laughing Bone

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

source

THE ARGUMENT

The Hand of God. Of course, it is everywhere - from the finest artists to Christian kitsch to crayon drawings of disaffected youth. It reaches out of Michelangelo to deliver the divine spark to the lifeless clay of Adam, the First Man. It emerges from the storm of chaos to unfold order into the world, which it holds within its grasp. It offers salvation, pulling us out of the Edenic womb into life. It guides us and supports us, offers sanctuary in times of need. The Hand of God is the ground of our being. However, there is a covenant between ourselves and this ground. And to transgress against it, is to incur the Divine Wrath. The supporting Hand is now raised against us, to push us away and then to narrow into the finger that judges us and condemns us. We are now the loathsome thing that shivers upon the Hand of God. We are now that which deserves only to be cast into the fire. But we are not. God holds us suspended over the flames by the fragile thread of our being. Our life is like unto a hanged man on a scaffold. The ground has fallen from underneath our feet. And we are dropped into darkness. We hang there awaiting death but not dying. Not yet. There is a splinter of salvation that has been inserted into the wound of the world, the slightest possibility for redemption. We are not dying. We are being reborn through sacrifice. And now we are turned around, hanging upside down in a world turned inside out. The esoteric has externalized into the exoteric. The Flesh is made Word. Mystic alchemy transforms us into what we might be become if we have will enough to imagine it. We are free from divinity, thrown away into a forlorn condition from the God. Within our hands is now the capacity for fire. The gift of Prometheus. And from the depths of our consciousness we rise up and strike the Hand of God, sinking our fangs in deep to His flesh, not to invenom him, but rather to restore our reserves for ourselves.

THE PASSAGE

From Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741

“The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince: and yet ‘tis nothing but his Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every Moment: Tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to Hell the last Night; that you was suffer’d to awake again in this World, after you closed your Eyes to sleep: and there is no other Reason to be given why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in the Morning, but that God’s Hand has held you up: There is no other reason to be given why you haven’t gone to Hell since you have sat here in the House of God, provoking his pure Eyes by your sinful wicked Manner of attending his solemn Worship: Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a Reason why you don’t this very Moment drop down into Hell.”

ON MEMORIZING SINNERS

I was walking around Lake Padden the other day, refreshing my memory of Sinners At the Hands of an Angry God. One of the techniques that I have found to be helpful during an extended session of memory work is to to have several pieces to move back and forth between. At times, the study of a single piece can start to echo and resonate within itself. I find that when what I am working begins to twist and turn and push against my effort, it is helpful to switch to another piece and clear the "loading dock," so to speak.

So I chose to work on Sinners (above), and also a passage from Thomas Mertion's Thoughts in Solitude:

The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. So too the mountain and the sea. The desert therefore is the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself - that is to say, a creature solitary and poor and dependent upon no one but God, with no great project standing between himself and his creator. This is, at least, the theory. But there is another factor that enters in.  First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the “wilderness of upper Egypt” to “wander in dry places.” Thirst drives men mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence - lost because he had immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.

And Father Mapple’s Sermon by Herman Melville via Orson Welles:

AND GOD PREPARED A GREAT FISH TO SWALLOW UP JONAH... 

Shipmates, the sin of Jonah was in his disobedience of the command of God. He found it a hard command. And it was, Shipmates. For all of the things that God would have us do are hard. If we would obey God, we must disobey ourselves. But Jonah still further flaunts at God by seeking to flee from Him. Jonah thinks that a ship, made by man, will carry him into countries where God does not reign. He prowls among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. And as he comes aboard, the sailor’s mark him. The ship puts out. But soon the sea rebels. It will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes up. The ship is like to break. The bosun calls all hands to lighten her: boxes, bails, and jars are clattering overboard. The wind is shrieking. The men are yelling. 

- I fear the Lord! cries Jonah. The God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!
Again, the sailors mark him: Wretched Jonah cries out to Him! Cast him overboard. For he knew. 

For his sake, this great tempest was upon them. 

Now behold Jonah: taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea, into the dreadful jaws awaiting him.  

And the Great Whale shuts to all his ivory teeth like so many white bolts upon his prison. And Jonah cries unto the Lord, out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, Shipmates. He doesn’t weep or wail. He feels his punishment is just. He leaves deliverance to God. And even out of the belly of Hell, grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, God heard him when he cried. 

And God spake unto the Whale. And from the shuddering cold and blackness of the deep, the Whale breeched into the sun and vomited out Jonah on the dry land. And Jonah, bruised and beaten, his ears like two seashells, still mutlitudinously murmuring of the ocean, Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. 

And what was that, Shipmates? TO PREACH THE TRUTH IN THE FACE OF FALSEHOOD. 

Now Shipmates, woe to him who seeks to pour oil on the troubled waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Yea, woe to him who, as the Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway. But delight is to him who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth stands forth his own inexorable self, who destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from the robes of senators and judges! And Eternal Delight shall be his, who coming to lay him down can say: 

Oh Father, mortal or immortal, here I die.
I have driven to be thine,
more than to be this world’s or mine own,
yet this is nothing
I leave eternity to Thee.
For what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?

I did a quick run through of Sinner's, checking my copy often. Getting a general feel for where my memory had slipped and substituted. My attention was more on syntax (form and order) than on semantics (meaning).

Then I switched to Father Mapple's Sermon. Part of me looking curiously, but without much focus, on connections between the sermons, styles of delivery, considerations of Edwards and Ahab. I was presently struck by the humanity in Father Mapple as compared with Edwards in Sinners. The relationship  between the speaker and listener was equally adamant and instructive, but in Father Mapple there was a deep abiding love for those to whom he preached. In Edwards, there was only hatred. While it obvious that Sinners is a fire and brimstone sermon, the contrast with Father Mapple's Sermon exposed a deeper wound of hate and self-loathing in Edwards.

After some time with Father Mapple's Sermon - which is one of my favorite pieces to recite back to myself - I turned to Merton. I noted that all three pieces are connected by the hard duties that God would have us do and the power of the Devil to turn us away from God's commands. The Merton piece unfolds like a logical syllogism. It illuminates an allegorical world and offers direction through warning. I have a sense of Merton's Pulse in the language, of personal trials and tribulations. But there is also an implicit forgiveness, especially in contrast to Sinners, that I had not noticed as much before.

Now, I turn back to Sinners to get it down perfectly, attending with full concentration on syntax and semantics, listening as deeply as I can to the voice the whispers between the words.

"The God that holds you"

I allow myself to imagine the ground of my being as God's Hand. The reassurance of the everyday, that presence, causality, temporality, extension are warranted by God's Hand. I have faith in this world that is holding me. The image is comforting. A parent holding a child. A hand holding a small animal. Protection. Love.

"over the Pit of Hell,"

And even now, with the threat of Hell below, I have faith in the strength and protection of God's Hand. 

"much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect,"

Everything is suddenly turned over. I am in the place of the "loathsome insect," "the Spider." My humanity has been equated with a lower life-form.  I wonder why I am being told this.

"over the Fire,"

And now this threat of Hell, of the Fire, is all too real. My faith and belief have been undermined. 

"abhors you"

And all collapses upon this phrase: "abhors you." God abhors me. There are awful resonances within the shuddering word, onomatopoetic exhalations that evoke demonic noises in the dark, Babylon's Whore stirring deep down. It is as of all of the language previous has drained down the black hole of this word. 

Every time I work on Sinners, starting out, repeating this first chunk, the power of the word "abhors" never diminishes. 

And from there, it only gets worse. I can see Edwards quietly burning in the pulpit spitting his venomous words to the congregation in a steady tone - making it all the more surreal and maddening to listen to. As if this were everyday speech. 

The question nags at the hymn of the sermon always: where did this come from? What happened to Edwards to provoke this Sermon of Hate and Damnation?

For example, here is a passage from Discourses on Various Important Subjects, Nearly concerning the great Affair of the Soul’s Eternal Salvation: viz. I. Justification by Faith Alone. II. Pressing into the Kingdom of God. III. Ruth’s Resolution.

You who are old sinners, who have lived long in the service of Satan, have lately seen some that were with you, that have travelled with you in the paths of sin these many years, that with you enjoyed great means and advantages, that have had calls and warnings with you, and have with you passed through remarkable times of the pouring out of God’s Spirit in this place, and have hardened their hearts and stood it out with you, and with you have grown old in sin; I say, you have seen some of them turning to God, i.e., you have seen those evidences of it in them, whence you may rationally judge that it is so. O let it not be a final parting! You have been thus long together in sin, and under condemnation; let it be your firm resolution, that, if possible, you will be with them still, now they are in a holy and happy state, and that you will follow them into the holy and pleasant land.  

You that tell of your having been seeking salvation for many years, though, without doubt, in a poor dull way, in comparison of what you ought to have done, have seen some that have been with you in that respect, that were old sinners and old seekers, as you are, obtaining mercy. God has lately roused them from their dulness, and caused them to alter their hand, and put them on more thorough endeavors; and they have now, after so long a time, heard God’s voice, and have fled for refuge to the Rock of Ages. Let this awaken earnestness and resolution in you. Resolve that you will not leave them.

Edwards wrote this in 1735, six years before Sinners. These are human words, kind words, the words of man who cares and loves those to whom he is addressing. What change, what violent episode can account for the hot branding words of Sinners.

Often as I am reciting Sinners, I find that I am laughing at the total annihilation of the language.

"Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a Reason 

why you don’t this very Moment drop down into Hell.”

That poor poor Puritan congregation at Enfield.

The people in Enfield "yelled and shrieked, they rolled in the aisles, they crowded up into the pulpit and begged him to stop," forcing Edwards at one point to "speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard". There was "great moaning & crying out through ye whole House. . .ye shrieks & crys were piercing & Amazing. . ." And yet the congregation knew its desire for a dead conscience. 

Seizing the congregation with terror and working them to the pitch of panic, Edwards reassures the Elect and glides to a composed and hopeful conclusion. The skilled revivalist preacher makes a direct and moving appeal to the unrepentant sinner, to seek again the better way: "Now God stands ready to pity you; this is a day of mercy; you may cry now with some encouragement of obtaining mercy."  Brattleboro History: "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" by Thomas St. John 

Again, I smile to imagine those who were "shrieking" and "rolling in the aisles," crowding "up into the pulpit" and begging him to stop. It is difficult to consider that these are the normal behaviors of a New England Puritan congregation. This was something of an other order.

I began to wonder, indeed, to become somewhat obsessed with tracing the sources of Edwards hatred, combing through biographies, researching back into Early American exploration, discovery and colonization, watching always for any thread that might feed into the Hell of Sinners. You can follow my path below and even deeper in The Source Material for Jonathan Edwards.

source

The more I learned in my research, the more I am convinced that there is a substantial amount of truth to Thomas St. John's thesis that Sinners was an "execution sermon." I consider Edwards the slave owner, the preacher who wanted to bring Christianity to the Indians, one of the key figures in the Great Awakening, now disillusioned in the aftermath, a man whose faith in other human beings has been diminished but whose faith in himself is adamant, inviolate, and never questioned. [emphasis mine]

Rev. Jonathan Edwards delivered the execution sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741. This execution sermon is a lurid and bitter jeremiad against the "New York Negro rebels" who were then being hanged and burned at the stake for a suspected plot to destroy the village of New York by arson fire.   

From May to August in 1741, at a market place described as lying in "a grassy valley", thirteen slaves were burned at the stake and seventeen were hanged. The executed were interred within a six-acre burial ground lying a long stone's throw southwest to a "marshy ravine". Hundreds were jailed, and seventy two were transported to certain death in the West Indies. Contemporaries compared these events to the 1692 Salem witch hysteria.
When Jonathan Edwards preached during July, twelve slaves had already been burned and nine were hanged, and the minister had no way of knowing how the horror would end. [...]   

Edwards plays on the racial fears of the Connecticut settlers and their memories of Indian uprisings with two Deuteronomy verses: "I will spend mine arrows upon them," and "I will make mine arrows drunk with blood". Enfield is reminded that "the arrows of death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them." 

"The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."   

Jonathan Edwards did not create terrifying visions of torture in order to hurl his people into despair. The congregation, unwilling to accept any responsibility for slavery and its trade, needed "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" to ease the intolerable pangs of conscience that were provoked by the events in New York. [...]

There is a tradition that Edwards delivered his discourse while staring fixedly at the bell-rope that hanged directly opposite the pulpit. This uncharacteristic preaching manner drew attention. Edwards likely stared not to the rope, but directly beyond it to the Negroes segregated aloft in the second-floor gallery.

Dwelling upon the scenes of agony in the New York colony, imagining his fellow ministers officiating at the stake and the scaffold, exhorting the rebels and sinners to confess, Jonathan Edwards chose his text---Deuteronomy 32 verse 35: "Their foot shall slide in due time.".

"In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, who were God's visible people, and who lived under the means of grace; but who, notwithstanding all God's wonderful works towards them, remained [as verse 28] void of counsel. . .". 

The expression "void of counsel" here refers to the fact that not one lawyer in New York came forward to defend the accused slaves.

The sheriff of New York dropped the scaffold trap so frequently that summer that Jonathan Edwards almost naturally describes and threatens a physical fall to perdition--the thought of him "that walks in slippery places", or that "walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering", and the failed rebel whose "foot shall slide in due time". Ministers in New York stood by the unconfessed, unrepentant, or defiant slaves, exhorting them to admit their guilt, and from afar, Jonathan Edwards considered these scenes of falling and fire:

"O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath. . .You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do to induce God to spare you one moment." 

Brattleboro History: "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" by Thomas St. John 

This compelling thesis adds a racial and social component to that sermon that helps to explain some of the fiery venomous language. Add to this many of the events in Edward's life and Sinners at the Hand of an Angry God begins to make more, albeit darker, sense.

Edwards genius as a writer of sermons has been tuned to its highest pitch. He masterfully sets up a series of mental images [see The Substance of the Matter below] to develop within the imaginations of the congregation. Remember, this is an auditory culture, comfortable with sitting for hours listening to sermons and speeches. Their minds are well-attuned to holding themes and allowing a speaker to develop themes and complex images over time.

Add to this the New York Riots, people being burned on the stake, brought to the gallows, dropped through the floor, to hang until dead. Add the constant threat of violence from Native Americans. Racial insecurities and fears rising from both Black and Indians. Add the hollow after-math of the Great Awakening, the disillusionment of many to walk the hard path of a truly religious life. Add death by violent unexplained seizures, ghosts of the Salem Witch Trials, relatives and friends despairing so much for their souls they slit their own throats. Add collapses of church floors, the gallow's doors falling away, earthquakes shuddering the very foundation of the world. Add the hidden history of the New World: cannibalism, betrayal of the natives, genocide, the plague, lost colonies going native, grey eyed indians, the rise of slavery white and black, the virgin land now violated over and over with sadistic fire and soaked through with the blood of innocents. Now, sum it all up to get an image of the God that reigns over this New World. Look at his hands....

The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, 

much as one holds a Spider, 

or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, 

abhors you, 

and is dreadfully provoked; 

I whisper this phrase, "dreadfully provoked over and over," seeking sense in it. Blake's Tyger comes to mind:

And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

I have an image of dread from Michelangelo's Last Judgement:

source

And this God now that abhors me is also "dreadfully provoked." Dread is a shark of word that has not evolved much etymologically over time. I want to hear Ahab in Edwards here. This Angry God as The White Whale. Our very existence like a harpoon thrown into its face. Dreadfully provoked.

his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; 

he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, 

but to be cast into the Fire; 

Here is the full and completed action of the trope: the Angry God wants to casts us, the loathsome insect, into the Fire. Fire fire fire. Three times in the first 52 words. To hear it is even more powerful as it flames up at the end of each of Edwards' condemnations. The fires of Hell licking our ears. And God's Love is nowhere, only the fiery Wrath. And the damning finality of being "worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the Fire." There is no other reason for God to care for what we are other than to throw us away.

he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight;

 you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes 

as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. 

This part always gets a smile from me. Unfortunately, my southern upbringing has flavored it with the haughty self-righteous voice Scarlet O'Hara or, on better days, a character from Tennessee Williams.

You have offended him infinitely more 

than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince: 

Here I return to Milton and Paradise Lost. The serpent morphing into Satan, Lucifer, the Rebel against his Prince, here God:

Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Again, the sense of having offended God "infinitely more" than Satan did destroys all measure of proportion. The imagination richly populated with Edwards' tropes is laid to a barren waste by the magnitude of this comparison. It is a a spiritually apocalyptic hyperbole. There is no where to go from here.

and yet ‘tis nothing but his Hand that holds you 

from falling into the Fire every Moment: 

And here the Hand of God returns. There is hope. There is salvation. But it is a slender thread from which we hang suspended over the burning fires in the Pit of Hell.

Then there follows the relentless sequence of "there is no reason why." This is a masterful temporal roller-coaster play of language that moves the listener from "the last night" to "this very moment." After that final Hell, you can almost hear the floor of the gallows dropping out from under the listener. Or more to my mind and times, an amusement park ride that lifts you to the highest point and then pauses before it drops you suddenly down without warning.

Tis to be ascribed to nothing else, 

that you did not go to Hell the last Night; 

No reason why. There is no other explanation why this did not happen. You should be feeling relief that you didn't go to Hell. That article "the" lends a, perhaps unintentional, rapturous quality to "the Last Night" as in The Last Judgement.

that you was suffer’d to awake again in this World, 

after you closed your Eyes to sleep: 

I have a particular affinity for this passage. I hear Cotton Mather and "suffered a witch to live." And I always think about waking in this world as opposed to another - as in another Universe. Some Twilight Zone episode where every morning I wake to a another Universe, a new world.

and there is no other Reason to be given 

why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in the Morning, 

but that God’s Hand has held you up: 

Here I sit on the side of my bed, hung-over and beat down, the day before me like a mountain of mundane minutes, each with its own private measure of suffering designed just for me. The thought of getting up and moving out into enough to bring on nausea and a headache. The only good thing about it is that there is not a weapon with which I could easily kill myself nearby. But thank God for your Hand that pushes me out into the world of suffering and quiet desperation.

There is no other reason to be given 

why you haven’t gone to Hell

since you have sat here in the House of God, 

provoking his pure Eyes 

by your sinful wicked Manner 

of attending his solemn Worship: 

There are a few tricky spots for memorization here in this last part. There are four parts:

1. Tis to be ascribed to nothing else...
2. and there is no other Reason to be given...

3. There is no other reason to be given...

4. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a Reason...

The first one is different enough to not cause much problem. And just remember that the next two are the same. But the fourth one is twisted a little, moving from "reason to be given" to "given as a Reason." Only by setting them down and numbering them am I able to keep them straight.

source

And again, with this final "provoking his pure Eyes," I am back in a surreal southern play with Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner busting out of their tight blouses as Richard Burton as Edwards is at a loss for words in the pulpit. I truly enjoy reciting this part and imagining different scenarios of "your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn Worship." Sometimes, I see a whole row a sexy demon girls and boys, wearing Puritan attire, all hot red like candy, with little horns poking out of holes in their buckle hats and slinky catlike pointed arrow tails curling into question marks behind them as they pretend to dutifully attend to Edwards' sermon.

Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a Reason 

why you don’t this very Moment drop down into Hell.”

And there are occasions when the above imaginings from Edwards words reach such a fevered pitch that I will pause for a moment here at the end and wait for the ground to fall out from underneath me.

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Jung

THE ROOTS THAT REACH DOWN INTO HELL

Source Material for Jonathan Edwards' Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God

There are a handful of thematic sources here:

source

MAGICAL IMPERIALISM AND THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT

1. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey - Specifically, the section "Gone to Croatan:"

The opening of the "new" world was conceived from the start as an occultist operation. The magus John Dee, spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented the concept of "magical imperialism" and infected an entire generation with it. Halkyut and Raleigh fell under his spell, and Raleigh used his connections with the "School of Night"--a cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and adepts--to further the causes of exploration, colonization and mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the new ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was its first showcase experiment.

Dancing Secotan Indians in North Carolina.
Watercolour painted by John White in 1585. source

Now you set your foot on shore
In Novo Orbe: here’s the rich Peru:
And there within, sir, are the golden mines,
Great Solomon’s Ophir!

2. "The School of Night" by Frederick Turner:

In any case, Raleigh entrusted to Hariot the scientific mission of the first Virginia Expedition of 1585. 

On that expedition the astonishing breadth of Hariot’s genius began to show itself. He mapped the coastline of the Hatteras peninsula, the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds and the shoals and island to the north and south. He recorded the new species of animals and plants that abounded in the New World, and gave them names; he wrote down the customs, history, and politics of the local Indians; he even made the first transcript of a North American Indian language, Carolina Algonquian, developing a system of English orthography for the purpose, and taking note of the interesting linguistic implications of its dialectal variations. He made friends with two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese. During the voyage he observed comets and eclipses, and developed an improved version of the cross staff, the navigational forerunner of the sextant. As geographer, cartographer, biologist, anthropologist, linguist, and astronomer he brought back out of the wreck of the colony not gold but the intangible riches that accrue from traffic with the unknown and the nonexistent. He had had his first brush with the Nothing, of the unnamed, and his eyes were opened. Perhaps the experimental, improvisational, and opportunistic spirit of American civilization derive mysteriously from that moment when Thomas Hariot first set foot upon those printless sands.

Absent any illustrations of the epidemics in New England, these Aztec drawings depicting smallpox, coupled with the words of William Bradford, convey something of the horror. "A sorer disease cannot befall [the Indians], they fear it more than the plague. For usually they that have this disease have them in abundance, and for want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. Ana then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep." (Quoted in Simpson, Invisible Armies, 8.) - Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

"WHEN THEY TURN THEM, A WHOLE SIDE WILL FLAY OFF AT ONCE AS IT WERE, AND THEY WILL BE ALL OF A GORE BLOOD, MOST FEARFUL TO BEHOLD."

3. Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen

Within three years [of 1617] the plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scarce left alive," wrote Robert Cushman, a British eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human experience. 

Unable to cope with so many corpses, the survivors abandoned their villages and fled, often to a neighboring tribe. Because they carried the infestation with them, Indians died who had never encountered a white person. Howard Simpson describes what the Pilgrims saw: "Villages lay in ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them.""

Footnotes Since the Wilderness

GOD'S PLAGUE

4. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick

In the spring of 1619, the English explorer Thomas Dermer sailed south from Maine in a small open boat. Accompanying Dermer was a Native guide who’d been abducted by Thomas Hunt in 1614. The Indian’s name was Tisquantum, or Squanto, and after five long years in Spain, England, and Newfoundland, he was sailing toward his home at Patuxet, the site of modern Plymouth. In a letter written the following winter, Dermer described what they saw:  

“[ We] passed along the coast where [we] found some ancient [Indian] plantations, not long since populous now utterly void; in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness. Their disease the plague, for we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who descried the spots of such as usually die. When [we] arrived at my savage’s native country [we found] all dead.”  

Squanto’s reaction to the desolation of his homeland, where as many as two thousand people had once lived, can only be imagined. 

source

This is the New World. The Virgin Land. The alchemical prima materia. The Country of Hope. These are the seeds of America. Whatever that word means today, it was a mysterious, almost magical, world for many in the 16th century. Their World was now the Old World: tired and used up. England, in particular, was hollow and spiritually bankrupt. The reformation begun by Luther in 1517 had degenerated into a political lever for Henry VIII and the Tudors. Heretical fires the followed. People burned for beliefs.

However, there was a charged cusp to things, this moment of freedom between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Old World and the New - whether this be geographic or psychological. Amidst the lowering gloom of spiritual and political anxiety there was the lightning of new thought, a new way to think, to speak, to create. Out of this unique juxtaposition in history came the extraordinary genius of Shakespeare. Also Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, Donne. Cervantes died on the same day 23 April 1616 as Shakespeare.

The New Lands across the sea offer the hope to reclaim a Lost Eden.  And this belief in Utopia, once planted within the European psyche, soon the American Psyche, sends its roots deep. Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. Pizarro and Orellana searching for El Dorado. Cabeza de Vaca and the Seven Cities of Gold. Early mythologies of the New World that still haunt America.

And perhaps the most pervasive myth: the search for the Land of Freedom. Winthrop's City on the Hill. The Puritans, the Pilgrims, the Planters, Separatists, the Persecuted, all.... each and every one, illuminated by the hope of the New World. 

With subtle prophecy, Thomas More coins a new word to name a fictional island society across the Atlantic. The word is Utopia. It means No Place. 

An Illustration from Thomas Hariot's
A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1585

But this New Eden was a violent and haunted place by the time the first colonists arrived. Plague had wiped out most of the thriving Indian population. The cleared fields fallow, the villages empty of life, littered with bones and skulls. This New World was "not a virgin wilderness, but recently widowed" (Loewen). In the image above from Hariot's Briefe and True Report, the snake has bitten Adam and Eve and the animals tear the meat off of their poisoned bodies, while Cain is burying his brother in the background.

A team of archaeologists from the Jamestown Rediscovery Project
have unearthed hard evidence that the colonists ate their own dead
during the deadly winter of 1609-10 known as "The Starving Time." source

The harsh light of day after the intoxicated dream of the night before is revelatory. In 1607 Jamestown was established on the ruins of the Virginia colony and is considered to be the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

source

Consider the Passage Over:

Water turned stale, butter turned rancid, and beef rotted. If Mittelberger's voyage ranked among the worst, Atlantic crossing were frequently at or near the worst, and many more disastrous ventures were recorded. With bad luck, provisions could give out. The Love and Unity left Rotterdam for Philadelphia in May 1731 with more than 150 Palatines and a year later landed with 34, after having put in toward the end at Martha's Vineyard for water and food. On the way rations became so low that water, rats, and mice were being sold, and the storage chests of the dead and dying were broken open and plundered by the captain and crew. A ship called the Good Intent - the names of eighteenth-century vessels often reek with irony - arrived off the American coast in the winter of 1751 but found herself unable to make port because of the weather; she was able to put in to harbor in theWest Indies only after twenty-four weeks at sea. Nearly all of the passengers had died long before. The Sea Flower, which left Belfast with 106 passengers in 1741, was at sea sixteen weeks, and lost 46 passengers from starvation. When help arrived, six of the corpses had been cannibalized.  Richard Hofstadter, White Servitude

Jamestown Island - source

Consider Those Who Landed: 

104 landed, only 38 survived the first winter. In the first 15 years, of the 10,000 that arrived in Jamestown, only twenty percent were still alive and living there in 1622. [source] 

During the “starving time” winter of 1609, there is this harrowing account:

“They ate their horses, then rats, then shoe leather. Some were driven to murder and digging up corpses. Others stashed food as they planned a secret return to England. Food was begged from the Indians or, if not forthcoming, stolen. The resulting cycle of attacks and counterattacks brought more misery and death.” [source]

Consider Relations with the Natives: 

In 1623 the British indulged in the first use of chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with tribes near the Potomac River, headed by Chiskiack. The British offered a toast "symbolizing eternal friendship," whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison. Besides, the early Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Indian corpses to eat or renting themselves out to Indian families as servants—hardly the heroic founders that a great nation requires.
James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

This is merely dusting over the surface of the skulls here. The litany of horrible, treacherous acts and monstrous behaviors of the early explorers and colonists (e.g. slavery, white and black) is long and tainted with blood of innocents. Prospero gone beserk. Caliban tortured into insanity. [See Source Material]. The point is to look beyond the carefully staged and culturally crafted kitsch of the American Mythology, to pull up the floorboards and show were all the bodies are buried, because these roots still feed an American Dream in a most nightmarish fashion. The always prophetic Poe burying the collective guilt in the Tell-Tale Heart. 

Specifically to the point at hand: Jonathan Edwards and Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God. The desire is to uncover the source of his Pulse. The semantic ground of meaning where the seeds of his words found fertile soil and where they continue to grow, as wretched and twisted as they may be.  

source

source

Note the difference between the two portraits.

The older Edwards below, disapproving, the pursed mouth,
slightly downturned, edging towards a frown, the intense stern gaze.

Above, the more relaxed, kinder image of a younger man.

THE WORLD OF MR. EDWARDS

Jonathan Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. His father, Timothy Edwards, was a Congregational Puritan minister. His mother, Elizabeth Stoddard, was the daughter was a well-known Puritan minister in Northampton. Edwards, the only son, grows up in a family of 10 sisters.

His paternal Grandmother, Elizabeth Tuttle, was problematic. She is usually described as having been "promiscuous" or even "a nymphomaniac," an unbalanced "crazy" relation who brought shame to the Edwards name and threatened to tarnish the Puritan legacy.

Ava Chamberlain in The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards, dismisses the "crazy-grandmother" narrative and chooses to focus on what influence Elizabeth Tuttle and "the fleshy particulars" may have had on the mind of Jonathan Edwards.

Elizabeth Tuttle was an ordinary puritan woman who was born in the New Haven colony in 1645. In 1667 she married a cooper named Richard Edwards and moved to Hartford, where her new husband lived. Less than seven months after the marriage she gave birth to an early baby, the first in the expected succession of children. In 1691, she separated from her family when the Connecticut General Court granted her husbands petition for a divorce. After this date she disappears; no record even notes the date of her death. [...]

The bodies of Edwards's seventeenth century ancestors are impossible to ignore. Some had sex with unsanctioned partners and neglected their marital duties. Others defaulted on their creditors because they could not manage their money. And two committed brutal murders in fits of violent rage or uncontrolled madness. These all-too-physical acts forcibly situate Edwards in the social history of colonial New England. They embed his mind in the fleshy particulars that constituted the daily lives of the colonists. That he was a product of this world, and that he engaged this world throughout his ministry, does not, as Miller believed, trap his thought in the eighteenth century, nor does it negate his literary and philosophical accomplishments. But it does challenge us to integrate his mind with his body and attend to how images of the ordinary people who inhabited his physical world have been constructed.  

To get a sense of how promiscuity or unusual behavior was perceived at the time, it is only necessary to look at how the unusual behavior of a group of young girls set the city of Salem, Massachusetts ablaze with suspicions and accusations and condemnations of witchcraft. Salem is 126 miles away from East Windsor. The Witch Trails took place in 1692, one year after the death of Elizabeth Tuttle and 11 years before the birth of Jonathan Edwards.

THAT YOU DID NOT GO TO HELL THE LAST NIGHT

source

Consider the whispered tales that comprised the psychological environment of Edwards' childhood and youth. Satan walking through the land, seducing and corrupting the mind of the weak and unwatchfull. This is a world with a palpable sense of Evil permeating the everyday.

This is Cotton Mather, a New England Puritan Minister involved in the Salem Witch Trials: [emphasis & paragraphs mine]. I quote at length to give the remarkable tone and tenor of Matthers' language, tracings of influence upon Edwards.

The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession.  

There was not a greater Uproar among the Ephesians, when the Gospel was first brought among them, than there was among, The Powers of the Air (after whom those Ephesians walked) when first the Silver Trumpets of the Gospel here made the Joyful Sound.
The Devil thus Irritated, immediately try'd all sorts of Methods to overturn this poor Plantation: and so much of the Church, as was Fled into this Wilderness, immediately found, The Serpent cast out of his Mouth a Flood for the carrying of it away.  

I believe, that never were more Satanical Devices used for the Unsetling of any People under the Sun, than what have been Employ'd for the Extirpation of the Vine which God has here Planted, Casting out the Heathen, and preparing a Room before it, and causing it to take deep Root, and fill the Land, so that it sent its Boughs unto the Atlantic Sea Eastward, and its Branches unto the Connecticut River Westward, and the Hills were covered with the shadow thereof.  

But, All those Attempts of Hell, have hitherto been Abortive, many an Ebenezer has been Erected unto the Praise of God, by his Poor People here; and, Having obtained Help from God, we continue to this Day. Wherefore the Devil is now making one Attempt more upon us; an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprizing, more snarl'd with unintelligible Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountred; an Attempt so Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon Enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell Trodden under our Feet.  

He has wanted his Incarnate Legions to Persecute us, as the People of God have in the other Hemisphere been Persecuted: he has therefore drawn forth his more Spiritual ones to make an Attacque upon us.  

We have been advised by some Credible Christians yet alive, that a Malefactor, accused of Witchcraft as well as Murder, and Executed in this place more than Forty Years ago, did then give Notice of, An Horrible Plot against the Country by Witchcraft, and a Foundation of Witchcraft then laid, which if it were not seasonally discovered, would probably Blow up, and pull down all the Churches in the Country.  

And we have now with Horror seen the Discovery of such a Witchcraft! An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural.  

After the Mischiefs there Endeavoured, and since in part Conquered, the terrible Plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its Progress into some other places, where other Persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled. These our poor Afflicted Neighbours, quickly after they become Infected and Infested with these Dæmons, arrive to a Capacity of Discerning those which they conceive the Shapes of their Troublers; and notwithstanding the Great and Just Suspicion, that the Dæmons might Impose the Shapes of Innocent Persons in their Spectral Exhibitions upon the Sufferers, (which may perhaps prove no small part of the Witch-Plot in the issue) yet many of the Persons thus Represented, being Examined, several of them have been Convicted of a very Damnable Witchcraft: yea, more than One Twenty have Confessed, that they have Signed unto a Book, which the Devil show'd them, and Engaged in his Hellish Design of Bewitching, and Ruining our Land.
We know not, at least I know not, how far the Delusions of Satan may be Interwoven into some Circumstances of the Confessions; but one would think, all the Rules of Understanding Humane Affairs are at an end, if after so many most Voluntary Harmonious Confessions, made by Intelligent Persons of all Ages, in sundry Towns, at several Times, we must not Believe the main strokes wherein those Confessions all agree: especially when we have a thousand preternatural Things every day before our eyes, wherein the Confessors do acknowledge their Concernment, and give Demonstration of their being so Concerned.  

If the Devils now can strike the minds of men with any Poisons of so fine a Composition and Operation, that Scores of Innocent People shall Unite, in Confessions of a Crime, which we see actually committed, it is a thing prodigious, beyond the Wonders of the former Ages, and it threatens no less than a sort of a Dissolution upon the World.  

Now, by these Confessions 'tis Agreed, That the Devil has made a dreadful Knot of Witches in the Country, and by the help of Witches has dreadfully increased that Knot: That these Witches have driven a Trade of Commissioning their Confederate Spirits, to do all sorts of Mischiefs to the Neighbours, whereupon there have ensued such Mischievous consequences upon the Bodies and Estates of the Neighbourhood, as could not otherwise be accounted for: yea, That at prodigious Witch-Meetings, the Wretches have proceeded so far, as to Concert and Consult the Methods of Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country, and setting up instead of it, perhaps a more gross Diabolesm, than ever the World saw before.  

And yet it will be a thing little short of Miracle, if in so spread a Business as this, the Devil should not get in some of his Juggles, to confound the Discovery of all the rest.  

PG - Project Gutenberg: The Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather, 1693 [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28513/28513-h/28513-h.htm]

1720 - Edwards completes his baccalaureate degree at the newly founded Yale College. He is 17 years old. He gives his oration entirely in Latin on the subject, “A Sinner Is Not Justified in the Sight of God Except Through the Righteousness of Christ Obtained by Faith.” [source]


1720 - The population of American colonists reaches 475,000. Boston (pop. 12,000) is the largest city, followed by Philadelphia (pop. 10,000) and New York (pop. 7000) [source]

MUCH AS ONE HOLDS A SPIDER

Figures drawn by Edwards - source

1723 - He writes his “Spider Letter,” detailing his study of the behavior of flying spiders.

“Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity admirable way of working. These spiders, for the present, shall be distinguished into those that keep in houses and those that keep in forests, upon trees, bushes, shrubs, etc. for I take ’em to be of very different kinds and natures (there are also other sorts, some of which keep in rotten logs, hollow trees, swamps and grass).  

Of these last, everyone knows the truth of their marching in the air from tree to tree, and these sometimes at five or six rods distance sometimes. Nor can anyone go out amongst the trees in a dewy morning towards the latter end of August or the beginning of September, but that he shall see hundreds of webs, made conspicuous by the dew that is lodged upon them, reaching from one tree and shrub to another that stands at a considerable distance, and they may be seen well enough by an observing eye at noonday by their glistening against the sun. And what is still more wonderful, I know I have several times seen, in a very calm and serene day at that time of year, standing behind some opaque body that shall just hide the disk of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays from my eye, multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings of a great length, and at such a height as (that one would think they were tacked to the sky by one end, were it not that they were moving and floating. And there often appears at the end of these webs a spider floating and sailing in the air with them, which I have plainly discerned in those webs that were nearer to my eye. And once [I] saw a very large spider, to my surprise, swimming in the air in this manner, and others have assured me that they often have seen spiders fly. The appearance is truly very pretty and pleasing, and it was so pleasing, as well as surprising, to me, that I resolved to endeavor to satisfy my curiosity about it, by finding out the way and of their doing it, being also persuaded that, if I could find out how they flew, I could easily find out how they made webs from tree to tree.” [PM] [http://www.apuritansmind.com/puritan-favorites/jonathan-edwards/scientific-writings/of-insects/]

1725 - The population of black slaves in the American colonies reaches 75,000. [source]

He marries Sarah Pierpont in 1727.

1729
February: Solomon Stoddard (Grandfather and Spiritual Mentor) dies; Edwards becomes senior pastor
June: suffers physical collapse
July: resumes preaching
December: sister Jerusha dies of "malignant fever”
[source]

source

ADDICTED TO NIGHT WALKING

In his Narrative of Many Surprising Conversions, Jonathan Edwards alluded to the difficulties that the Puritan church experienced after about the year 1700. It seemed that the younger members of the church were behaving in a way that Edwards considered immoral:

“After the last of these [ingatherings], came a far more degenerate time, (at least among young people) I suppose, than ever before. . . . Just after my grandfather’s death, it seemed to be a time of extraordinary dullness in religion: Licentiousness for some years greatly prevailed among the youth of the town; they were many of them very much addicted to night walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices, wherein some by their example exceedingly corrupted others. It was their manner very frequently to get together in conventions of both sexes, for mirth and jollity, which they called frolicks; and they would often spend the greater part of the night in them, without any regard to order in the families they belonged to: And indeed family government did too much fail in the town.”  

Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton

source

1731 - May 7: purchases "Negro girl named Venus" for £80 in Newport, R.I.

[Source: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University http://edwards.yale.edu/ http://www.yale.edu/wje/html/chronology.html ]

ON JUNE 7, 1731, four men gathered around a table in a southern New England seaport, possibly at a tavern, to transact some business. Three of them—one of advanced middle age, the other two about a decade younger, wearing fashionable suits and having by them on the table, or balanced on a crossed knee, fine hats—had the look of experienced sailors. Beneath the coats of at least two of them could be seen what might, in the low light, have been the glint off of a sword hilt or the lock plate of a pistol. The fourth was an apparently fragile man in his late twenties, so thin as to look "emaciated, and impair'd in his Health." He was dressed in the wig, black suit, and Geneva tabs that he always made a point of wearing in public. To see this fourth man, with all the distinguishing marks of a clergyman, in such company must have struck onlookers as odd, and perhaps the other three men covertly shared bemused looks over the serious, thin-lipped minister as he watched one of his companions take up a quill, dip it into a well, and fill out a bill of sale—a receipt for a slave, "a Negro Girle named Venus," whom this man of God was buying.   

Kenneth P. Minkema, Jonathan Edwards's Defense of Slavery [doc] From The Massachusetts Historical Review Vol. 4, Issue NA.


WHY HAVE YOU NOT DROPPED INTO HELL SINCE YOU AROSE IN THE MORNING?

1732 - September 5: earthquake at noon

On earthquakes in New England:

Near Moodus, Middlesex County, Connecticut - 1791 -  Intensity VII

Largest Earthquake in Connecticut
[http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1791_05_16.php]

The region around East Haddam, on the Connecticut River northeast of New Haven, has been the scene of a series of local disturbances since this country was settled. The region southeast of Middletown has been referred to in Indian tradition as Morehemoodus, or "place of noises." The first reported earthquake began on May 16 with two heavy shocks in quick succession. Stone walls were shaken down, tops of chimneys were knocked off, and latched doors were thrown open. A fissure several meters long formed in the ground. In a short time, 30 lighter shocks occurred, and more than 100 continued during the night. Reported felt at Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City, New York.

Condensed from A Brief History of East Haddam, Connecticut, written by Dr. Karl Stofko and Rachel Gibbs. [http://www.easthaddam.org/History-1756/]

Before 1650

Until 1650, the area of East Haddam was inhabited by at least three tribes of Indians: the Wangunks, the Mohegans and the Nehantics. The Indians called the area “Machimoodus,” the place of noises, because of numerous earthquakes that were recorded between 1638 and 1899. Loud rumblings, the “Moodus Noises,” could be heard for miles surrounding the epicenter of the quakes near Mt. Tom. The land, which is now Haddam and East Haddam, was purchased from the Indians in 1662 for thirty coats – worth about $100.

source

THAT YOU WERE SUFFERED TO AWAKE AGAIN IN THIS WORLD

Edwards described a change that took place in the winter of 1733–1734:

There began to appear a remarkable religious concern at a little village belonging to the congregation, called Pascommuck . . . , where a few families were settled, at about three miles distance from the main body of the town. At this place a number of persons seemed to be savingly wrought upon.  

In the April following, Anno 1734, there happened a very sudden and awful death of a . . . youth; who being violently seized with a pleurisy, and taken immediately very delirious, died in about two days; which . . . much affected many young people. This was followed with another death of a young married woman,who had been considerably exercised in mind, about the salvation of her soul, before she was ill, and was in great distress in the beginning of her illness, but seemed to have satisfying evidences of God’s saving mercy to her, before her death; so that she died very full of comfort, in a most earnest and moving manner, warning and counseling others.  

Although almost every New Englander at the time had had brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, or cousins who had died, these two deaths in 1734 invaded the minds of the people of Northampton. As a result, they became more receptive to hearing God’s word. Edwards wrote of this time: 

In the fall of the year, I proposed it to the young people, that they should agree among themselves to spend the evenings after lectures, in social religion, and to that end to divide themselves into several companies to meet in various parts of the town; which was accordingly done, and those meetings have been since continued, and the example imitated by elder people.   

Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton 

1734 - In December, the Great Awakening religious revival movement begins in Massachusetts. The movement will last ten years and spread to all of the American colonies.

The First Great Awakening began in the 1730s and lasted to about 1743, though pockets of revivalism had occurred in years prior especially amongst the ministry of Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards's grandfather. [source]

source

HE IS PURER OF EYES THAN TO BEAR TO HAVE YOU IN HIS SIGHT

1735
March 25: Thomas Stebbins unsuccessfully attempts suicide by cutting his throat
April 8: attends Hampshire Association meeting at Springfield
June 1: Joseph Hawley, Sr., commits suicide by slitting his throat [source]

Edwards signed the letter on May 30, 1735. Four days later, he wrote a postscript: 

Since I wrote the following letter, there has happened a thing of a very awful nature in the town; My uncle Hawley, the last Sabbath morning, laid violent hands on himself, & put an end to his life, by cutting his own throat. He had been for a considerable time greatly concerned about the condition of his soul; till, by the ordering of a sovereign Providence he was suffered to fall into deep melancholy, a distemper that the family are very prone to. 

Joseph Hawley was Edwards’s uncle by marriage. He was the most successful merchant in Northampton and had been highly esteemed by his fellow parishioners. No matter what gloss Edwards attempted to put on it, Hawley’s suicide was a grave loss to the town and to the revival movement occurring within it. 

Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton

THERE IS NO OTHER REASON TO BE GIVEN

WHY YOU HAVE NOT GONE TO HELL.

SINCE YOU HAVE SAT HERE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD,

PROVOKING HIS PURE EYES

BY YOUR SINFUL WICKED MANNER

OF ATTENDING HIS SOLEMN WORSHIP

A remarkable event took place on March 13, 1737, however— an event that appeared to boost both Edwards’s spirits and the energy of his congregation:  

We in this town were, the last Lord’s day, (March 13th) the spectators, and many of us the subjects, of one of the most amazing instances of Divine preservation, that perhaps was ever known in the world. Our meeting-house is old and decayed, so that we have been for some time building a new one, which is yet unfinished. It has been observed of late, that the house we have hitherto met in, has gradually spread at the bottom; the sills and walls giving way . . . . So that in the midst of the public exercise in the forenoon, soon after the beginning of the sermon, the whole gallery—full of people, with all the seats and timbers, suddenly and without any warning— sunk, and fell down, with the most amazing noise, upon the heads of those that sat under, to the astonishment of the congregation. The house was filled with dolorous shrieking and crying; and nothing else was expected than to find many people dead, or dashed to pieces.  

Edwards explained that although many people were injured, none of the injuries were serious, and not a single person had been killed. He went on:  

It seems unreasonable to ascribe it to any thing else but the care of Providence, in disposing the motions of every piece of timber, and the precise place of safety where every one should sit and fall.   

While this event should have brought Edwards and his congregants closer, however, Edwards still despaired of them.  

Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton

1740 - Fifty black slaves are hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, after plans for another revolt are revealed. [source]

1741 - The Negro Plot.

Rumors of a conspiracy arose against a background of economic competition between poor whites and slaves; a severe winter; war between Britain and Spain, with heightened anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feelings; and recent slave revolts in South Carolina and the Caribbean. In March and April 1741, a series of 13 fires erupted in Lower Manhattan, the most significant one within the walls of Fort George, then the home of the governor. After another fire at a warehouse, a slave was arrested after having been seen fleeing it. A 16-year old Irish indentured servant, Mary Burton, arrested in a case of stolen goods, testified against the others as participants in a supposedly growing conspiracy of poor whites and blacks to burn the city, kill the white men, take the white women for themselves, and elect a new king and governor. 

Two slaves were burned at the stake. Before their executions, they confessed to burning the fort and named dozens of others as co-conspirators. News of the "conspiracy" set off a stampede of arrests, although the fires ended. Trials and executions followed through the summer. At the height of the hysteria, nearly half the city's male slaves over the age of 16 were in jail. The number of arrests totaled 152 blacks and 20 whites. They were tried and convicted in a show trial. John Ury, a teacher and suspected Catholic priest, was charged with instigating the plot. 

Most of the convicted people were hanged or burnt – how many is uncertain. The bodies of two supposed ringleaders, Caesar, a slave, and John Hughson, a white cobbler and tavern keeper, were gibbeted. Their corpses were left to rot in public. Seventy-two men were deported from New York, sent to Newfoundland, various islands in the West Indies, and the Madeiras. [Wikipedia]

HE LOOKS UPON YOU AS WORTHY OF NOTHING ELSE,

BUT TO BE CASE INTO THE FIRE

source

1741 - July 8: preaches Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, published shortly thereafter  [source]

Where did this harsh language come from? Was this the same Edwards renowned for his goodness toward his family and his faithful service to his Northampton community?One of the best clues to this comes from the work of George Marsden, whose monumental biography of Edwards was published in 2003. Marsden, like many other writers, acknowledged that Edwards was a man of calmness, dignity, and compassion but also that Edwards knew plenty of woe in his family growing up. Timothy Edwards had been an exemplary father and the immediate family had known peace and prosperity, but Edwards’s grandmother had been a nymphomaniac, his great uncle had killed one of his great-aunts with an axe, and another great-aunt had killed one of her children. Thus, Jonathan Edwards had plenty of material in the back of his mind with which to create the horrible scenes of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  

Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton

YOU HAVE OFFENDED HIM INFINITELY MORE 

THAN EVER A STUBBORN REBEL DID HIS PRINCE

On March 18, 1741, the first of a series of suspicious fires broke out in New York’s Fort George. When a few weeks later a black man was seen running from the scene of one of these fires the cry went up: “The negroes are rising!” The extent of the plot, or even if there really was a plot, has never been absolutely proven. What is true is that the threat of a slave uprising was enough to send the city’s white population into hysteria. Of the 181 people arrested during the “Great Negro Plot,” 34 were sentenced to death and 72 were transported from New York. In this excerpt from the trials, several important witnesses provided evidence. Peggy was a white prostitute who lived in the home of John Hughson, a riverfront tavenkeeper and, like shoemaker John Romme, a receiver of stolen goods. Peggy’s room was paid for by Caesar, a slave with whom she had a child. Today the trial transcripts are valuable for what they reveal about the shady, waterfront world shared by slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in 18th-century New York.   

Daniel Horsmanden, The New-York Conspiracy, or a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings Against the Conspirators at New-York in the Years 1741–2. From History Matters.

Giuseppe Tartini (1692 – 1770) 

Today, Tartini's most famous work is the "Devil's Trill Sonata," a solo violin sonata that requires a number of technically demanding double stop trills and is difficult even by modern standards. (One 19th-century myth had it that Tartini had six digits on his left hand, making these trills easier for him to play.) According to a legend embroidered upon by Madame Blavatsky, Tartini was inspired to write the sonata by a dream in which the Devil appeared at the foot of his bed playing the violin. [source]

THEY ROLLED IN THE AISLES,

THEY CROWDED UP INTO THE PULPIT

AND BEGGED HIM TO STOP

Rev. Jonathan Edwards delivered the execution sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741. This execution sermon is a lurid and bitter jeremiad against the "New York Negro rebels" who were then being hanged and burned at the stake for a suspected plot to destroy the village of New York by arson fire.  

From May to August in 1741, at a market place described as lying in "a grassy valley", thirteen slaves were burned at the stake and seventeen were hanged. The executed were interred within a six-acre burial ground lying a long stone's throw southwest to a "marshy ravine". Hundreds were jailed, and seventy two were transported to certain death in the West Indies. Contemporaries compared these events to the 1692 Salem witch hysteria.
When Jonathan Edwards preached during July, twelve slaves had already been burned and nine were hanged, and the minister had no way of knowing how the horror would end. [...]  

Edwards plays on the racial fears of the Connecticut settlers and their memories of Indian uprisings with two Deuteronomy verses: "I will spend mine arrows upon them," and "I will make mine arrows drunk with blood". Enfield is reminded that "the arrows of death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them". 

"The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."  

Jonathan Edwards did not create terrifying visions of torture in order to hurl his people into despair. The congregation, unwilling to accept any responsibility for slavery and its trade, needed "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" to ease the intolerable pangs of conscience that were provoked by the events in New York. 

The people in Enfield "yelled and shrieked, they rolled in the aisles, they crowded up into the pulpit and begged him to stop," forcing Edwards at one point to "speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard". There was "great moaning & crying out through ye whole House. . .ye shrieks & crys were piercing & Amazing. . ." And yet the congregation knew its desire for a dead conscience. 

Seizing the congregation with terror and working them to the pitch of panic, Edwards reassures the Elect and glides to a composed and hopeful conclusion. The skilled revivalist preacher makes a direct and moving appeal to the unrepentant sinner, to seek again the better way: "Now God stands ready to pity you; this is a day of mercy; you may cry now with some encouragement of obtaining mercy."  Brattleboro History: "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" by Thomas St. John 

source

Mr. Edwards was over six feet tall, with a high forehead and a long narrow face; his expression was sweet and rather feminine; he was very thin, from continuous study; he wore, as was customary, a white wig, and a black gown, and was clothed beneath his gown in a coat and breeches of black broadcloth. He used no gestures, but stood motionless, with his eyes fixed on the bell-rope straight in front of him, his left elbow leaning on the cushion and his left hand holding his notes; his voice was low and a little monotonous, but well-cadenced, precise, and distinct; it went on pitilessly, like the voice of God Himself. He took as his text a passage from Deuteronomy-"Their foot shall slide in due time."  

Having explained the text, he went on to say that nothing kept wicked men out of hell for a single moment but the arbitrary pleasure of God; God was more angry with many men still alive-doubtless with many that were sitting at ease in that congregation-than with many who were already in hell; the devil stood ready to seize them, and their own sin was a pent-up fire which, when God permitted, would immediately turn their souls into fiery ovens or furnaces of brimstone; nothing but the pleasure of a God who hated them saved them from a sudden death at any moment of the day. . . .  

This sermon was interrupted by outcries from the congregation; the details have not been recorded; but . . . pandemonium broke loose. All over the meeting house men and women stood up and rolled on the floor, shrieking and screaming; it was like a forest smitten by a hurricane. "Oh, I am going to hell," they cried; "alas for our frolicks and our dances; how shall we remember them in hell." For many minutes the building was filled with the fearful wail of condemned souls; then they secured quiet, and Mr. Wheelock prayed, and the ministers climbed down from the pulpit. But long past sunset and through the night Enfield was like a beleaguered city; in almost every house men and women could be heard crying out for God to save them; they fancied that at any moment Christ might descend in judgment from the sky with the archangels and the apostles at this side, and the graves would give up their dead; and the little children were afraid to play, and pleaded with the Almighty to save them.   

This Enfield sermon has become notorious. Many people think of Edwards only as the preacher of the most terrific hellfire sermons of which we have record.   

Henry Bamford Parkes on The Fiery Puritan (1930)

1757

September 29: trustees of College of New Jersey write to offer presidency [source]

I have a constitution, in many respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flaccid solids, vapid, sizy and scarce fluids, and a low tide of spirits. . . . This makes me shrink at the thoughts of taking upon me, in the decline of life, such a new and great business, attended with such a multiplicity of cares, and requiring such a degree of activity, alertness, and spirit of government; especially as succeeding one so remarkably well qualified in these respects.  

Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton

A BAD YEAR FOR THE EDWARDS FAMILY 

1758
January 27: father dies [source]

Jonathan Edwards arrived at Princeton early in 1758. He had hardly set up his first meeting with the trustees when he received the news of his father’s death. Timothy Edwards had been in good health throughout most of his 89 years. Jonathan Edwards accepted this loss as one of the worst in a decade in which he had known plenty of sorrow. His daughter Jerusha, his friend David Brainerd, his son-in-law Aaron Burr, and now his father were all dead. Edwards was preoccupied with thoughts of his own death. He often wrote to his children to this effect, reminding them of how fleeting life was and of the great need to find safety in the Lord before their demise.  

Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton

February 16: assumes office as president of College of New Jersey
February 23: inoculated for smallpox
March 22: Jonathan Edwards dies of complications from inoculation [source]

April 7: daughter Esther Burr dies

October 2: Sarah Pierpont Edwards dies of dysentery in Philadelphia

1759
July 25: estate inventoried and probated
August 4: slaves Joseph and Sue, "lately the proper goods of . . . Jonathan Edwards, deceased," sold to John Owen of Simsbury, Conn., for £23, by executors Timothy Edwards and Timothy Dwight [source]

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE MATTER

A full and most accurate text of the sermon can be found at the DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

The full title to the sermon runs thusly:

S I N N E R S 

In the Hands of an

Angry G O D.

A SERMON

Preached at Enfield, July 8th 1 7 4 1.

At a Time of great Awakenings ; and attended with 

remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers.

By Jonathan Edwards, A.M.

Pastor of the Church of Christ in Northampton.

Then there is an epigram:

Amos ix. 2, 3. Though they dig into Hell, thence shall mine Hand 

take them ; though they climb up to Heaven, thence will I 

bring them down. And though they hide themſelves in the Top 

of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence ; and though 

they be hid from my Sight in the Bottom of the Sea, thence I will 

command the Serpent, and he shall bite them.

And finally, the "expression chosen for the text" that sets everything off:

DEUT. XXXII. 35.

Their Foot shall slide in due Time

After exploring a handful of reasons of the how and why "the wicked Israelites" might slide into destruction, there follows ten Considerations. In each of these. Edwards sets up a series of powerful images to develop within the minds of the congregations. Remember, this is an auditory culture, comfortable with sitting for hours listening to sermons and speeches. Their minds are well-attuned to holding themes and allowing a speaker to develop themes and complex images over time. 

Listen and observe:

HANDS - Men’s hands are powerless compared to God’s hands.

“Mens Hands can’t be strong when God rises up: The strongest have no Power to resist him, nor can any deliver out of his Hands.” 

“There is no Fortress that is any Defence from the Power of God. Tho’ Hand join in Hand, and vast Multitudes of God’s Enemies combine and associate themselves, they are easily broken in Pieces: They are as great Heaps of light Chaff before the Whirlwind; or large Quantities of dry Stubble before devouring Flames.”

INSECTS AND SPIDERS - Easily crushed, cast into the fire.

“We find it easy to tread on and crush a Worm that we see crawling on the Earth; so ‘tis easy for us to cut or singe a slender Thread that any Thing hangs by; thus easy is it for God when he pleases to cast his Enemies down to Hell.”

HOLDING THE THREAD - See above.

So in the first consideration, Edwards gives us three powerful images: the power of God’s hand, the powerlessness of insect and the cutting of a thread. He will develop these over the course of the sermon.

2. HELL - God may cast anyone into Hell and destroy them.

“They deserve to be cast into Hell; so that divine Justice never stands in the Way, it makes no Objection against God’s using his Power at any Moment to destroy them.”

3. CONDEMNATION AND WRATH - To not believe, is to be condemned to Hell, to suffer God’s wrath.

“they are bound over already to Hell. Joh. 3. 18. He that believeth not is condemned already. So that every unconverted Man properly belongs to Hell; that is his Place; from thence he is.”

4. THE WRATH OF GOD IS THE FIRE OF HELL.

“The Wrath of God burns against them, their Damnation don’t slumber, the Pit is prepared, the Fire is made ready, the Furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the Flames do now rage and glow.”

LETTING LOOSE HIS HAND. CUTTING THEM OFF. 

“Yea God is a great deal more angry with great Numbers that are now on Earth, yea doubtless with many that are now in this Congregation, that it may be are at Ease and Quiet, than he is with many of those that are now in the Flames of Hell. So that it is not because God is unmindful of their Wickedness, and don’t resent it, that he don’t let loose his Hand and cut them off.”

5. IF GOD WITHDRAWS HIS HAND

“if God should withdraw his Hand, by which they are restrained, they would in one Moment fly upon their poor Souls. The old Serpent is gaping for them; Hell opens his Mouth wide to receive them; and if God should permit it, they would be hastily swallowed up and lost.”

6. THE RESTRAINING HAND OF GOD AND THE SEEDS OF HELL WITHIN US

“There is laid in the very Nature of carnal Men a Foundation for the Torments of Hell: There are those corrupt Principles, in reigning Power in them, and in full Possession of them, that are Seeds of Hell Fire. These Principles are active and powerful, and exceeding violent in their Nature, and if it were not for the restraining Hand of God upon them, they would soon break out, they would flame out after the same Manner as the same Corruptions, the same Enmity does in the Hearts of damned Souls, and would beget the same Torments in 'em as they do in them.”

7. THE SINNER MAY DROP INTO HELL AT ANY MOMENT

“The unseen, unthought of Ways and Means of Persons going suddenly out of the World
are innumerable and inconceivable. Unconverted Men walk over the Pit of Hell on a rotten Covering, and there are innumerable Places in this Covering so weak that they won’t bear their Weight, and these Places are not seen.”

IF NOT FOR GOD’S HANDS

“All the Means that there are of Sinners going out of the World, are so in God’s Hands, and so universally absolutely subject to his Power and Determination, that it don’t depend at all less on the meer Will of God, whether Sinners shall at any Moment go to Hell, than if Means were never made use of, or at all concerned in the Case.”

8. ALL THE WISDOM OF GOOD MEN WILL NOT SAVE THEM FROM UNEXPECTED DEATH

“There is this clear Evidence that Men’s own Wisdom is no Security to them from Death;
That if it were otherwise we should see some Difference between the wise and politick Men of the World, and others, with Regard to their Liableness to early and unexpected Death; but how is it in Fact? Eccles. 2. 16. How dieth the wise Man? as the Fool.”

9. ALL THE CLEVERNESS AND CONTRIVANCES OF WICKED MEN WILL NOT SAVE THEM

“Almost every natural Man that hears of Hell, flatters himself that he shall escape it; he depends upon himself for his own Security; he flatters himself in what he has done, in what he is now doing, or what he intends to do; every one lays out Matters in his own Mind how he shall avoid Damnation, and flatters himself that he contrives well for himself, and that his Schemes won’t fail. They hear indeed that there are but few saved, and that the bigger Part of Men that have died heretofore are gone to Hell.”

10. THERE IS NO PROMISE OR GUARANTEE THAT GOD WILL SAVE YOU

“God has laid himself under no Obligation by any Promises to keep any natural Man out of Hell
one Moment. God certainly has made no Promises either of eternal Life, or of any Deliverance or Preservation from eternal Death, but what are contained in the Covenant of Grace, the Promises that are given in Christ, in whom all the Promises are Yea and Amen.”

We are now just about halfway through the sermon. Edwards has laid the foundation for his theme, setting up a series of images with explanation. And then there is this extraordinary visual summary of the above BUT referring TO OTHERS, to “natural Men.”

“So that thus it is, that natural Men are held in the Hand of God over the Pit of Hell; they have deserved the fiery Pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his Anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the Executions of the fierceness of his Wrath in Hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that Anger, neither is God in the least bound by any Promise to hold 'em up one moment; the Devil is waiting for them, Hell is gaping for them, the Flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the Fire pent up in their own Hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no Interest in any Mediator, there are no Means within Reach that can be any Security to them. In short, they have no Refuge, nothing to take hold of, all that preserves them every Moment is the meer arbitrary Will, and uncovenanted unobliged Forbearance of an incensed God.”

What follows is the application, where Edwards becomes increasingly fiery and moves from “natural Men” to directly addressing the congregation, to “you.” Note the use of the previous imagery, built now to a crescendo. 

“That World of Misery, that Lake of burning Brimstone is extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful Pit of the glowing Flames of the Wrath of God; there is Hell’s wide gaping Mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, not any Thing to take hold of: there is nothing between you and Hell but the Air; 'tis only the Power and meer Pleasure of God that holds you up. You probably are not sensible of this; you find you are kept out of Hell, but don’t see the Hand of God in it, but look at other Things, as the good State of your bodily Constitution, your Care of your own Life, and the Means you use for your own Preservation. But indeed these Things are nothing; if God should withdraw his Hand, they would avail no more to keep you from falling, than the thin Air to hold up a Person that is suspended in it. Your Wickedness makes you as it were heavy as Lead, and to tend downwards with great Weight and Pressure towards Hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend & plunge into the bottomless Gulf, and your healthy Constitution, and your own Care and Prudence, and best Contrivance, and all your Righteousness, would have no more Influence to uphold you and keep you out of Hell, than a Spider’s Web would have to stop a falling Rock."

The central theme built up from repetition of images and metaphors, is that God’s hand holds us dangling over fires of Hell like a spider from the thread of its web - that which has issued out of its own body. And God does not hold us in a loving way. He is incensed and angry at our sinfulness and his anger is the burning fire below us. He may at any point, for any reason, let go or cut the thread from which we dangle. 

After further vivid demonstrations of God’s wrath and our precarious sinful existence outside of Hell, Edwards states what I believe is the essence of Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God. 

This is the passage I chose to commit to memory:

“The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince: and yet ‘tis nothing but his Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every Moment: Tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to Hell the last Night; that you was suffer’d to awake again in this World, after you closed your Eyes to sleep: and there is no other Reason to be given why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in the Morning, but that God’s Hand has held you up: There is no other reason to be given why you havn’t gone to Hell since you have sat here in the House of God, provoking his pure Eyes by your sinful wicked Manner of attending his solemn Worship: Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a Reason why you don’t this very Moment drop down into Hell.”