Edwards’s weeping intervenes in Whitefield’s account of conversion and religious expression by addressing the connection between tears and speech. Edwards’s converted subject is, like Whitefield’s, generated out of the repetition of the performance of conversion, but the pleasures and public presence of Edwards’s subject are generated by the “loud” performance of self-isolation, weeping, and silence. Overcome by an acutely affecting sense of God’s excellence, Edwards experienced “a kind of a loud weeping” that lasted for hours, so that he was “forced to shut [himself] up” in a room “and fasten the doors.” This self-isolation is the somatic experience of a previously figurative desire for self-effacement, one associated, in an earlier episode of weeping, with a sense of personal abjection and total dependence on Christ.86 His assertion of self-control (locking himself up) at the very moment of self-dissolution enables an extended affective performance of abjection but also disrupts Whitefieldean conversion narratives’ association of affective performance and speech: during his weeping, Edwards concludes, he “could not but as it were cry out, ‘How happy are they which do that which is right in the sight of God!’ ”87 By presenting his self-isolation as literal and his speech as metaphorical, Edwards reverses Whitefield’s, and many lay preachers’, use of abjection as the prelude to religious speech. Imagining a form of sublimity that rejects Whitefield’s “compulsive public utterance[s]” and works against emerging liberal subjectivity, Edwards narrates the enclosure of his otherwise uncontrollable affective religious performance in a space of guarded isolation.
Edwards’s account of tearful self-isolation here resembles seventeenth-century Puritan converts who, when their sense of personal humiliation failed to lead to a sense of divine love, found themselves lost in “shame’s isolated silence,” but it proposes an alternate path to religious speech.88 Edwards describes his room as a place of emotional reflection, a private space of tearful isolation from which to better imagine public action.89 In the language of spiritual warfare some revivalists adopted, Edwards’s isolation signals not a withdrawal from the revivalist public but a strategic shift of the field of battle into the less impersonal public of the letter.
In closing his account with a scene of tearful, meditative self-isolation, Edwards also offers insight into his decision to circulate his narrative privately. By insisting that his speaking subject be grounded in the sense of abjection and uncertainty, Edwards’s conversion narrative attempts to manage revivalist speech by engaging the narrative practices of the colonial dispossessed and translating them into a more entirely affective register, but he may have recognized that his narrative was likely to go awry in the evangelical public. Given the potential audience for his conversion narrative, Edwards’s decision not to publish, along with his subsequent preference for analytic treatises and sermons over the more widely accessible narrative form (notwithstanding The Life of David Brainerd, which deserves more detailed consideration elsewhere), suggests his awareness of the capacity of the evangelical public to transform the meaning of his work and reluctance to expose himself to broad and intense scrutiny. By circulating the letter privately, Edwards could better predict and control the audience, influencing those of similar or higher rank while minimizing other interpretations and transformations of his account.
Conversion and Masochism’s Philosophical Bases
Edwards’s conversion narrative frustrates the genre’s contribution to the development of a modern liberal subject by insisting on the uncertainty of grace and limiting the public authority granted to the gracious self. In his conversion narrative’s description of his affecting sense of God’s grace, Edwards describes a divine sublimity that closely resembles Kant’s sublime, which Deleuze and several literary critics have identified as an important basis for the literary and philosophical development of masochism. Deleuze, whose analysis of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1869) offers the best account of masochism’s philosophical bases, argues that a necessary precondition to masochistic desire was the Enlightenment transformation of the law from a Platonic/Christian model, in which the law is dependent on a higher principle, such as “the good” or God, into a Kantian/Oedipal model, in which the good is premised on the law, in which “moral law is the law” and in which the law is “by definition unknowable and elusive” because it must constantly disguise those things it bans.90 This Kantian/Oedipal model, Deleuze concludes, helps create the modern subject by premising subjectivity on an acceptance of guilt.91
Kant’s description of the law’s sublimity has much in common with Edwards’s Calvinistic account of God’s terrible power, as both are fundamentally unrepresentable, free from human intentionality, and beyond human influence. Indeed, the shift from the Platonic/Christian model to the Kantian/Oedipal model was effected, in part, by the Calvinist logic of salvation by faith alone that Edwards champions. Kant’s formulation of moral law reflects an Edwardsian understanding of predestination: those who obey the law, rather than feel righteous, are bound to feel, as Deleuze writes, “guilty in advance.” Agreeing with Edwards in the fundamental unrepresentability of sublimity but attempting to liberate humanity from the strictures of religion, Kant removes that guilt from its moorings in the idea of a transcendent omnipotent God.92 By grounding subjectivity in the “universal rational religion dwelling in every ordinary man,” Kant makes irrationality the “sin” of Enlightenment.93 Kant’s attempt to translate Christian law into humanist rationalism offers a mirror image of Edwards’s attempt to incorporate affect into a strict Calvinism.
The political implications of these two opposing descriptions of the sublime help explain Edwards’s defense of extreme religious affect in two subsequent treatises, Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741) and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), that stand as theological companion pieces to his conversion narrative. In attempting to limit the power of affect to challenge existing ecclesiastical hierarchies of speech, Edwards’s sublime counterbalances evangelical speech by women, the young, the poor, and other marginal groups against the liberal humanist constructions of subjectivity that would also threaten ministerial power.
Because Kant’s theory of sublimity derived from his attempt to transform Burke’s political and aesthetic notion of sublimity into moral and idealistic concepts, a brief review of Burke’s differences with Edwards will help clarify the way in which Edwards’s political concerns contributed to his construction of sublimity. Burke and Edwards both develop Shaftesbury’s account of sublimity in “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (1707), which offers a limited endorsement of “divine enthusiasm” resulting from “ideas or images received [that] are too big for the narrow human vessel to contain” and used “to express whatever was sublime in human passions.”94 Sharing this common point of departure, Burke’s description of sublimity, which is frequently credited with offering the earliest description of pleasurable emotional pain, agrees with Edwards’s account of his painfully pleasurable sense of God’s power.95 Though rhetorically aligned in their description of sublime power, they differ in their evaluation of the source of pleasure. Burke’s illustration of sublimity as the sense of “shrink[ing] into the minuteness of our own nature” and being metaphorically “annihilated before [God]” closely resembles Edwards’s description of his response to God’s excellence.96 Burke’s path to sublime pleasure also resembles a notion of conversion as a singular, metamorphic “new birth,” or the emergence of a saintly self out of the destruction of the sinful self, in which the sense of God’s terrible power is transformed into rapturous joy through God’s grace. For Burke, however, this painful sense of power, which he calls terror, can delight only if its source is placed at some distance through active and strenuous exertion. Burke here follows Shaftesbury’s conclusion that only “enthusiasm” guided by “reason, and sound sense … sedate, cool, and impartial; free of every bypassing passion, every giddy Vapor, or melancholy