Burke, by describing sublime pleasure as the result of escape from divine power, presents a fantasy of self-creation through flight that provides an aesthetic framework for the construction of bourgeois liberal subjectivity in eighteenth-century England.98 Edwards’s sublime attempts to forestall a Burkean departure from his script by describing encounters with overwhelming divine power as pleasurable, thereby disallowing Burke’s path to self-creation. This difference helps account for Edwards’s refusal to reject even the most harmful performances of affect. What Burke and Shaftesbury condemn as the “horrid convulsions” of “languid and inactive … nerves” incapable of overcoming the source of terror, and what other anti-revivalists called “Visions, Trances, Convulsions [and] Epilepsies,” Edwards describes, in Some Thoughts, as being “weakened by strong and vigorous exercises of love” to Christ.99 In characterizing weakness and pain as “exercises of love,” Edwards embeds sublime pleasure in the experience of divine power and defends ministerial power against a specifically liberal threat emanating from the staging of the emergence of a gracious self.
Edwards’s opposition to Burke’s conception of the self as defined by a flight from overwhelming power is based on Edwards’s theological association of the phenomenological world with the fallen world. Edwards’s faith in biblical guidance and human corruption places more severe limits on human knowledge than most Enlightenment empiricists allow. Edwards takes up the language of sensation and sympathy only to argue that the “human” experience it produces is sinful and abject, not semi-divine. In so doing, his conversion narrative presents a challenge to the genre’s role in the development of modern liberal subjectivity, interrupting its development of an individuated psyche by repudiating the movement from “sinful” to “gracious” self. Edwards refutes emerging liberal descriptions of human nature as compatible with the divine by describing faith as the joyful acceptance of absolute human abjection and endorsing an affective, tearful experience of both personal abjection and God’s sovereignty. In this way, Edwards’s tears in his conversion narrative ambivalently refigure St. Francis’s blood. Both are shed in a sacrificial manner, but while St. Francis describes his experience to all who will listen, Edwards’s tears are accompanied by a retreat into meditative isolation and the more private realm of the letter. By adopting the individual affective experience of sorrow and selflessness to reestablish Calvinist uncertainty, Edwards conflates the affective realization of abjection with the joy of redemption.100
Edwards’s relationship to masochism’s Kantian foundations lies in his location of pleasure in the experience of weakness and overwhelming divine power. This relationship is complemented by his preemptive refusal to follow other Enlightenment writers, including Kant but especially Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson, in their development of the connection between affect, sympathy, and moral virtue.101 Edwards’s conversion narrative, in endorsing an affecting sense of God’s excellence and personal abjection, appears to promote a proto-masochistic pleasure in self-disruption by staging a proliferation of the desire for abjection and a loss of self-control. Edwards thereby seems to posit a religious subject whose desires are premised on the same logic that, as Marianne Noble argues, would structure the more “properly” masochistic pleasures of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature, in which the religious discourse of eroticized submission to the divine is gradually transformed into a secular discourse of transcendent erotic sub-mission.102 However, as Sandra Gustafson’s analysis suggests, Edwards has a more immediate and more vexed relationship to this sentimental literary tradition than Noble indicates.103 Edwards’s portraits of exemplary converts in the Faithful Narrative draw directly on English sentimentalism in its staging of scenes of death and suffering, and his conversion narrative adopts affect as a way of frustrating the development of a modern self, separable from God, for whom such suffering might be perverse.
The pleasurable affective experience of abjection that Edwards describes was in the process of becoming perverse through Enlightenment humanism’s promotion of common sense as the basis for moral action and social cohesion. Theories of common sense, as developed by Smith, Hutcheson, and others, propose that our innate sympathetic response to suffering, combined with our natural inclination toward pleasure and away from pain, will prompt us to alleviate suffering in others. Edwards, in contrast, proposes that such sympathy is dependent on divine blessing or grace. In the absence of grace, our sense of pity is determined by the discrepancy between the sufferer’s actual state and what we consider his or her proper state. Pity is thus a mode of judgment rather than a sensational or physical response. For example, Edwards’s discussion of “self-love” and “private affections” in his The Nature of True Virtue (1765) takes a middle path between Scottish Common Sense philosophers and cynics such as Bernard Mandeville. Edwards agrees that sympathy is a basis for society and moral virtue, but he follows Mandeville’s account of sympathy as governed by the extent to which the sufferer’s interests are aligned with the observer’s and that sympathetic pain may be mixed with pleasure.104 In following Mandeville’s proposal that sympathy produces an ambivalent reaction to others’ suffering, Edwards allows for Sade’s eroticization of suffering, which demands a sentimental, Richardsonian interest in the sufferer.105 This ambivalence, in which the sympathetic experience of suffering excites simultaneous pity and delight, would play an important role in the sexualization of erotic suffering.106
Edwards perfected his strategy of invoking and then intervening in the connection between abjection, evangelical speech, and the development of a Lockean liberal self in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). As several scholars note, Religious Affections reworks Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding by offering a measured evaluation of the intimate, embodied relationship between individual affect, thought, and social order.107 Religious Affections explores how the affectionate speech of a body of believers can productively disorder civil and religious society. Disruptions in both individuals and communities may, if properly discerned and managed, forward the work of grace. Key to this evaluation is Edwards’s extended metaphorical comparison of the disruptions of individual bodily function caused by religious affect to the disruptions of New England’s civil and ecclesiastical body caused by revivalists’ disorderly speech. Just as each convert should use his or her affecting sense of individual abjection as a means to evaluate his or her spiritual state, so must the church body in New England use the tumult caused by the revivals to evaluate their divine destiny as a social and spiritual community.
In Religious Affections, Edwards proposes that contemporary ministers risk repeating the seventeenth-century New England Puritan failure to form a wholly divine community if they do not distinguish spiritual corruption from divine influence.108 He evaluates the revivals’ effect on New England as a discrete community of believers, explicitly revisiting and partially sentimentalizing the seventeenth-century New England Puritan association of feminine weakness, wifely subjection, and maternal suffering with submission to patriarchal government. Compressing the most vivid and literal descriptions of physical suffering from Lamentations 1 into a single sentence, Edwards asks his readers to imagine the daughter of Zion as she “lies on the ground, in such piteous circumstances … with her garments rent, her face disfigured, her nakedness exposed, her limbs broken, and weltering the blood of her own wounds, and in no wise able to arise.” Edwards sentimentalizes the image of the suffering woman by condensing Lamentations’ diffused and insistently metaphorical images of suffering into an intensely physical suffering felt by a single figure. Edwards complicates the sentimental trajectory of the trope by taking special care to associate the daughter of Zion’s wounds with the blood of the “menstruous woman.” Zion has “none to comfort her,” Edwards writes, because she is tropologically related to the “menstruous woman” whose corrupting influence caused her to be shunned.109