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Jonathan Edwards's ontology: a critique of Sang Hyun Lee's dispositional account of Edwardsian metaphysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2010

OLIVER D. CRISP
OLIVER D. CRISP*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Bristol, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TB
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Sang Hyun Lee's account of Jonathan Edwards's ontology has become the benchmark of many recent discussions of Edwards's thought. In this paper, I argue that this Lee interpretation is flawed in several crucial respects. In place of Lee's understanding of Edwards I offer an account of Edwards's work according to which Edwards is an idealist-occasionalist, but not an advocate of a purely dispositional ontology of creation.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 1 - 20
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. See Sang Hyun Lee The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, expanded edn (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000 [1988]). All references will be to this version of Lee's book, which will be cited parenthetically in the body of the text as PTJE followed by a page reference. Some of the central issues in Lee's monograph are showcased in his essay ‘Edwards on God and nature: resources for contemporary theology’, in Sang Hyun Lee & Allen C. Guelzo (eds) Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and The Shaping of American Religion (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 15–44; and idem ‘Does history matter to God? Jonathan Edwards's dynamic reconception of God's relation to the world’, in Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, & Caleb J. D. Maskell (eds) Jonathan Edwards at 300, Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2005), 1–13. A more substantial peroration upon his earlier work is Lee's editorial introduction to Jonathan Edwards Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, XXI, Sang Hyun Lee (ed.) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2003) (hereinafter cited as YE21, followed by page number). Lee's views have not significantly changed in these later works, so I shall focus my efforts on his monograph, with some reference to his more recent contributions where appropriate.

2. Representative examples of Edwards scholars that have appropriated the Lee interpretation include Gerald R. McDermott One Holy and Happy Society, The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), ch. 3; Anri Morimoto Jonathan Edwards and The Catholic Vision of Salvation (University Park PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), passim; and (more cautiously) Amy Plantinga Pauw The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 88–89. Stephen H. Daniel's interpretation of Edwards sounds at times like Lee's, but is different in important respects (e.g. he is concerned to offer a ‘postmodern’ account of Edwards drawing on themes in continental philosophy). See Daniel's recent essays: ‘Edwards as philosopher’, in Stephen J. Stein (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 162–180; ‘Postmodern concepts of God and Edwards's Trinitarianism’, in Lee & Guelzo Edwards in Our Time, 45–64, and his monograph, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards (Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

3. See Stephen R. Holmes ‘Does Jonathan Edwards use a dispositional ontology? A response to Sang Hyun Lee’, in Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp (eds) Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 99–114. In the same symposium I offer some reason for thinking that the Lee interpretation is not indubitable, although my main concern there is to show that Edwards was a consistent occasionalist rather than to take issue with the Lee interpretation of Edwards as such; see my ‘How “occasional” was Edwards's occasionalism?’, in ibid., 61–77. Three other recent essays that offers a different interpretation of Edwardsian ontology from Lee, but which do not engage Lee directly, are Thomas Schafer's editorial introduction to Jonathan Edwards The ‘Miscellanies’ (entry nos. a–z, aa–zz, 1–500), The Works of Jonathan Edwards, XIII, Thomas A. Schafer (ed. ) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1994), hereinafter cited as YE13, followed by a page number; William J. Wainwright's excellent entry ‘Jonathan Edwards’, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/edwards/; and Richard R. Niebuhr's ‘Being and consent’, in Sang Hyun Lee (ed.) The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 34–43. Also of use is George Marsden's biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2003), ch. 4. My own reading of Edwards's ontology is largely consistent with that expressed in these essays.

4. For example (in order of publication), Smyth, Egbert C. ‘Jonathan Edwards's idealism: with special reference to the essay “Of Being” and to writings not in his Collected Works’, The American Journal of Theology, 1 (1897), 950–964CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gardiner, H. N. ‘The early idealism of Jonathan Edwards’, The Philosophical Review, 6 (1900), 573–596CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rupp, George ‘The idealism of Jonathan Edwards’, Harvard Theological Review, 62 (1969), 209–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. There are different sorts of essentialist doctrine, to be sure, and the Edwardsian account is consistent with an immaterial realism, the notion that there are real immaterial substances of a sort – about which, more presently. A brief overview of the idea of substance and its importance for philosophy at the time Edwards was writing, particularly in the work of Locke, Hume and Berkeley, can be found in E. J. Lowe Locke on Human Understanding (London: Routledge, 1995), ch. 4.

6. Holmes's essay is concerned primarily with the second of Lee's contentious claims, although this leads him in the end to state unequivocally that ‘Edwards did not use a dispositional ontology’; in ‘Does Jonathan Edwards use a dispositional ontology?', 108. However, it is, I think, undeniable that Edwards held an account of God according to which there is ‘a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emanation of his own infinite fullness’ which ‘excited him to create the world’; from the Dissertation on the End of Creation in Jonathan Edwards Ethical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, VIII, Paul Ramsey (ed.) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 435, emphasis in the original [hereinafter cited as YE8]. Quite how one should understand this dispositional aspect of Edwards's doctrine of God is a subject for another occasion. But note that there is nothing inconsistent in claiming that: (a) God is a substance, and (b) God has a dispositional property to create the world. What is problematic about Edwards's dispositional account of the divine nature is that the second of these two claims appears incompatible with his stated allegiance to the actus purus account of the divine nature, according to which God is metaphysically simple. See, e.g. his Freedom of the Will, where Edwards says God is ‘of perfect and absolute simplicity’; Freedom of the Will, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, I, John E. Smith (ed.) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 377 [hereinafter cited as YE1]. See also ‘Miscellanies’ nos. 94, 135 and 308 in YE13, where Edwards endorses the pure-act tradition unequivocally. Lee himself concedes that ‘Edwards's references to [divine] simplicity are few, but they cannot be ignored’; see YE21, 23.

7. Lee speaks of habits and tendencies without recourse to subjects that have these tendencies, which is rather odd. One would think an active tendency is an active tendency of something, and perhaps this is what Lee means, although he does not always say so.

8. Dispositions and desires are distinct things. To see this, consider an example where Trevor's brain has been tampered with so that he automatically runs in certain circumstances irrespective of whether he desires to run or not. I thank a referee for this journal for drawing my attention to this example.

9. Later on I will attribute problematic views to Edwards, but I think there is very good reason for thinking Edwards held to the problematic views I have in mind, such as occasionalism.

10. I take it that a substance can be material (the body of that person) or immaterial (the soul of that person), and is that thing which exemplifies properties (the skin of his body is brown; his soul has a certain relation of ownership to the body it is ‘attached’ to). And I take it that an essence, or nature of a thing, is usually thought to be that set of properties which a thing cannot cease to have without ceasing to be that thing, e.g. ‘being a dependent rational animal’ for a given human person. Having said that, human nature might not be merely or fundamentally a property, but a concrete particular. This is a traditional theological view and one that has been defended elsewhere in the recent literature. See, e.g. Marilyn McCord Adams Christ and Horrors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 6; and Oliver D. Crisp Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 2.

11. See also Lee's recent essay, ‘God's relation to the world’, where he says ‘Edwards saw reality not in terms of substances and forms, as had been done for so many centuries, but rather as a network of lawlike habits and dispositions’; Lee Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards, 59. Lee's more recent work is unequivocal about the replacement of the concept of substance in Edwards's ontology.

12. I use the term ‘attribute’ deliberately, since this term is consistent with either ‘predicate’ or ‘property’.

13. Compare Hume's famous remark that ‘when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, or heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception’; David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1739–1740]), 252 (emphasis original).

14. Thus, ‘we accustom our selves, to suppose some Substratum, wherein they [ideas, that is, qualities] do subsist, and from which they do result, which therefore we call Substance’; John Locke An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Peter Nidditch (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II. XXIII. 2, 295 (hereinafter, cited as Essay, followed by book and section).

15. I am simplifying things a little in order not to extend this discussion unduly. Bundle theorists might adopt one of several accounts of the attributes a created being has. Some might believe in the existence of properties as universals and think that a given being exemplifies properties. Others may think that only particulars exist, as with nominalism. And there are other views in the neighbourhood too. I speak here of properties or predicates to indicate that the bundle theorist need not be committed to one view about whether there are abstracta like properties, or not. I take it that predicates do not require this ontological commitment. Michael J. Loux does a good job of navigating this discussion in Metaphysics, A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), ch. 3, and my account here owes much to his clear exposition.

16. However, it seems pretty clear this was Berkeley's view: ‘What I am myself, that which I denote by the term I, is the same as what is meant by soul or spiritual substance …. Spirits and ideas are things so wholly different, that when we say, they exist, they are known, or the like, these words must not be thought to signify anything common to both natures. There is nothing alike or common in them …. Hence it is evident, that God is known as certainly and immediately as any other mind or spirit whatsoever, distinct from ourselves’; George Berkeley Principles of Human Knowledge, Roger Woolhouse (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988 [1710]), 106, 107, 108 respectively (emphasis original).

17. Lee says that Edwards's conception of law and habit function ‘on the level of Aristotelian substantial forms’, and that for Edwards, ‘the distinction between substance and accident is collapsed into one category’, namely, the category of habits (PTJE, 79). So, according to Lee, Edwards effectively removes substantive forms from his ontology, replacing them with habits and laws.

18. ‘Edwards occasionally uses the word “substance,” but what he means by it is radically new’ (PTJE, 49.) From the context of this passage it is clear Lee understands that this refers to the divine substance. However, later he claims that Edwards's theology proper is ‘nothing less than a basic reconception of the Western philosophical theism that was heavily dependent on the categories of Greek philosophy’. He continues, ‘the essence of the divine being is a disposition, not a substance or pure form’ (PTJE, 174 and 175, respectively.) But Edwards seems to believe that God is an immaterial substance that has an essential disposition to create, which is a rather different way of thinking about this. See, e.g. Miscellany no. 553 in Jonathan Edwards, The ‘Miscellanies’ (entry nos. 501–832), The Works of Jonathan Edwards XVIII, Ava Chamberlain (ed.) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 97 and End of Creation, ch. 1, sect. 2 in YE8, 428–435.

19. Jonathan Edwards Scientific and Philosophical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, VI, Wallace E. Anderson (ed.) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 215, (hereinafter, cited as YE6, followed by a page reference). Anderson's introduction to this volume offers a useful introduction to some of the issues discussed here.

20. At the risk of labouring the point, I agree with Lee that Edwards does think there is an essential dispositional aspect to the divine nature. But I do not agree that this means God is essentially a disposition. According to Edwards, God is an immaterial substance who has an essential disposition to ‘emanate’ or ‘communicate’ himself in a work of creation.

21. ‘Of Atoms’, ‘Of Being’, and ‘The Mind’ are all found in YE6. Miscellany ‘pp’ is found in YE13. Lee plots the course of Edwards's intellectual development in ch. 3 of PTJE. Useful discussion of this matter can also be found in Reid, Jasper ‘Jonathan Edwards on space and God’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41 (2003), 385–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. YE13, 188, referred to by Lee in PTJE, 58.

23. The idea that Edwards often synthesized ideas he gleaned from a wide variety of sources is not novel. Amy Plantinga Pauw makes much of this in her account of Edwards's Trinitarian theology, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2002), ch. 6, as, in a rather different manner, does William Morris in his account of Edwards's early intellectual development, The Young Jonathan Edwards, A Reconstruction (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005 [1955]).

24. I have discussed Edwards's doctrine of occasionalism at length in Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), and ‘How “occasional” was Edwards's occasionalism?’. This latter paper in particular deals with the Lee interpretation of Edwards's concept of laws as found in the important ‘Miscellany 1263’. See also Norman Fiering Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought in its British Context (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 51–52, 279–280, 307–308; and Avihu Zakai Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 101–108. But cf. Stephen A. Wilson Virtue Reformed: Re-reading Jonathan Edwards's Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 2005), ch. 3, esp. 179–189 for an alternative view. I refer the interested reader to the discussion in my own work, as well as that of Fiering and Zakai for more on the textual material that supports my reading of Edwards's occasionalism.

25. See Jonathan Edwards Original Sin, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, III, Clyde A. Holbrook (ed.) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 402–405, hereinafter cited as YE3. All emphases in the citations from this text are Edwards's. Schafer notes that Edwards's views in Original Sin are consistent with his earliest Miscellanies, where he endorses the continuous creation of all created beings, including immaterial substances. See YE13, 43 and Miscellany 18, in YE13, 210.

26. See Freedom of the Will, where Edwards states that his use of the term ‘effect’ (viz. of a cause) ‘is perhaps rather an occasion than a cause, most properly speaking’; YE1, 181. Elsewhere in his early notebook ‘Of Atoms’, he denies that there are mechanisms ‘whereby bodies act upon each other purely and properly by themselves’; YE6, 215–216. And in ‘Subjects to be handled in a treatise on the mind’, no. 43 (a projected work he never completed), he queries whether the connection of ideas including the ideas of cause and effect, ‘may not be reduced to these following: Association of Ideas; Resemblance of some kind; and that Natural Disposition in us, when we see any thing begin to be, to suppose it owing to a Cause’; YE6, 391–392. This sounds strikingly like the Humean regularity theory.

27. This has not gone unnoticed in the literature. The late Thomas Schafer, doyen of Edwards scholars, remarks that, for Edwards, ‘There is simply no realm of even relatively autonomous “second causes” between God and the world. Not only humankind but also all creation is immediately, totally dependent each moment on God's decision to continue both the fact and the manner of its existence. There are, of course, “natural laws” by which the world continues to operate; but what we call natural law is only the “method” or “rule” by which God has chosen to exercise his power’; YE13, 42.

28. The main stumbling block to this way of conceiving what Edwards says about occasionalism is his long Miscellany 1263, which Lee takes as evidence of his own dispositional account. But I have argued that there is good reason to think Edwards was a consistent occasionalist, contrary to the Lee interpretation in Holmes ‘How “occasional” was Edwards's occasionalism?’. See also Zakai Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History, 104–107, who suggests something similar.

29. Objection: What about instantaneous acts, such as intentional acts are often thought to be – occasionalism might be consistent with a created agent bringing about such acts since they take (almost) no time. And Edwards is not absolutely clear that each momentary world God creates has zero duration, which would be needed in order to exclude the possibility that created agents could bring about instantaneous acts. Reply: it is true that Edwards does not define what he means by the word ‘moment’ when he speaks of momentary world-stages in his occasionalism in YE3. But it does seem clear that he thought no creature was a causal agent and that God alone is the cause of all that takes place. See YE3, 402–403. In any case, this is not going to be much help to Lee, since there is still no ‘time’ on Edwards's view, for dispositions to be realized, unless one takes the view that all properties possessed by a created entity are capable of being realized instantaneously, which is obviously impossible.

30. But perhaps created substances are not identified with momentary bundles of properties or attributes, but with a series of such bundles that exists seriatim in the divine mind. Then, the sequence of momentary property bundles ordained by God would constitute the attributes of a given substance, either (a) as it exists across time, or (b) taken together as an aggregate across time of momentary stages of bundles. Problem: created substances cannot exist across time if occasionalism is true. This counts out the first of these consequents. But the second is promising and seems consistent with much of what Edwards says. Then a table, a tree, or a terrapin is just those stages of bundles across time that God ‘treats as one’ as Edwards has it. And the substance that is a table, tree, or terrapin just is the aggregate of these bundles across time. This alternative, though closer in some respects to the Lee interpretation is still distinct from what Lee actually says. On this way of thinking God simply treats numerically distinct momentary stages or bundles as one. But this still leaves no time for dispositions to be realized.

31. The fact that the young Edwards, like many other Christian thinkers of the period, expended a considerable amount of intellectual energy in refuting the Hobbesian notion that the only intelligible view of substance is that of a material substance, such that if God is a substance, He must be a material substance, is well-known and has been rehearsed a number of times in the literature. I shall not reiterate such arguments here.

32. Edwards is not always as clear about this as one might like. For instance, in Miscellany 267 he writes of God's continuous creation of everything including each created thought, and goes on to explain that God alone (not some other thing that has no properties) brings about all created things. At the end of this short entry he says created things are property bundles, but it is not entirely clear whether he means to refer only to created material objects – although, given what he says elsewhere, it appears this is what he means. See YE13, 373, and Edwards's comments on the ‘excellency’ of created spirits in YE6, 337.

33. Compare Edwards in ‘Notes on knowledge and existence’, which includes the following: ‘How God is as it were the only substance, or rather, the perfection and steadfastness of his knowledge, wisdom, power and will’; YE6, 398. Cf. ‘Images of Divine Things’, no. 8, where Edwards says God makes the whole material world ‘a shadow of the spiritual world’. In Typological Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, XI, Wallace E. Anderson, Mason I. Lowance, & David H. Watters (eds) (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 53. See also William Wainwright's essay, ‘Jonathan Edwards and the language of God’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 48 (1980), 519–530.

34. Compare ‘The Mind’, entry 35 in YE6, 355, where Edwards concedes how difficult it is to speak consistently of the soul's relation to the brain, ‘[s]eeing that the brain exists only mentally’. To speak more accurately, he says, we must affirm that the brain is ‘nothing but the connection of the operations of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing that the brain exists only as an idea’. Note the way in which Edwards allows that there are created souls, although he conjoins this with a very strong doctrine of immediate dependence on the deity, commensurate with his endorsement of occasionalism elsewhere.

35. This does seem to mean that, in the final analysis, God is alone on Edwards's metaphysics ‘talking to a reflection of himself in a mirror’, as Schafer puts it; YE13, 49.

36. This ‘correction’ of his earlier, immature endorsement of More in the direction of immaterialism has been recently discussed by Jasper Reid in ‘Jonathan Edwards on space and God’.

37. Compare Anderson's comments in YE6, 60–65, and Schafer's in YE13, 40–42, which deals with the relationship between Edwards's early writings and More.

38. Edwards explicitly makes this cross-reference between the excerpt from ‘Of Atoms’ just cited and entry 26 in ‘Things to be considered’. Incidentally, it should be obvious from the foregoing that the statement ‘matter is not matter’ strictly speaking, is simply trivially true, given idealism.

39. God is prior to all created things because He is timelessly eternal, according to Edwards, whereas the created order is neither timeless nor everlasting in time. But on Edwards's way of thinking it would not be true to say that the creation of the world is a contingent matter, because, for Edwards, God must create a world and God must create this world. Thus, Edwards embraced panentheism, the idea that the world is the necessary product of the divine creativity. Lee is partially right in his characterization of this aspect of Edwards's thought. But space forbids a fuller exposition of this issue here. Interested readers should consult PTJE, chs 7–8, and William Wainwright ‘Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe, and the necessity of creation’, in Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds) Faith, Freedom, and Responsibility, (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).

40. It is an interesting question as to who this idealist occasionalism is intended for, who experiences it, and why it is important for God to produce a series of world-stages that are segued together so that action appears to continue across time. It seems to me that Edwards is clear in places like his treatise on The End of Creation and what it says about the concept of ‘excellency’ with respect to God in ‘The Mind’ that all this is for the greater glory of God. The whole idealist-occasionalist creation must appear to perdure in order for it to reflect the order and fittingness with which God does all things.

41. I am grateful to Paul Helm and William Wainwright for comments on a previous draft of the paper, and Sang Hyun Lee for helpful conversation.