Cast Down. Mark J. Miller
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of abjection, followed by rapturous joy and pleasure, signals their sense of God’s love and their own salvation.
These converts spoke and wrote themselves into an evangelical public that offered them an ambivalent embrace. Like many nineteenth-century Native Americans, African Americans, and white women who modified the conversion narrative form to enable their own publicity, these eighteenth-century converts’ frequent qualification of their visions and senses as “thought,” or otherwise imagined, attempts to negotiate the greater scrutiny applied to representations and affective performances by the colonial dispossessed.
Edwards’s rhetoric of self-dissolution and abjection translates the physical, embodied visions and sensory experiences described by many poorer converts into a largely internal, affective drama. This shift signals his attempt to promote greater rhetorical self-control and attention to rank. His attempt becomes clearer when we read his Faithful Narrative alongside his 1741 letter to Deborah Hatheway, a recent young convert in Suffield, where Edwards had briefly served as substitute pastor. Edwards begins by repeating his Faithful Narrative’s advice to “set up religious meetings,” but rather than promote the certainty of conversion, in the manner of the licentious convert’s “flash of lightning,” Edwards recommends Hatheway act as though she was uncertain. Because gracious converts are under “infinitely greater obligations,” Edwards writes, Hatheway should evince even more “strife and earnestness” or “earnest and violent” behavior than before conversion, being “always greatly abased for your remaining sin,” “never think[ing] that you lie low enough for it,” and performing acts “that make you the least and lowest, and most like a child.” Because conversion is never truly certain, the best way to maintain a regenerate state is to act as though suspended in the moment immediately before conversion, a state of continuous becoming that never entirely resolves itself into being.
Public expressions of personal abjection, Edwards continues, are most persuasive when the speaker attends carefully to relative rank. When “speaking to your equals,” Edwards advises, “let your warnings be intermixed with expressions of your sense of your own unworthiness … and if you can with a good conscience, say how that you in yourself are more unworthy than they.”75 Edwards takes care to avoid the silence that could stem from such a suspension of assurance, a silence associated with the suicide’s melancholy and despair. Instead, Edwards’s ideal speaking subject—his exemplary convert—generates careful speech out of the sense of sin and abjection that precedes assurance, not in the movement from doubt to assurance. The speaker’s heightened awareness of social status allows him to carefully calibrate his religious expressions and performances for the demands of the audience, minimizing revivalists’ overstepping of rank to maintain the revivals’ legitimacy and fostering social circumstances in which further individual conversions could take place.
Edwards concluded his conversion narrative with a scene of extended weeping that may be his most striking and complex portrait of religious affect. Long before the age of sentiment, tears had been a symbol of repentance and sign of passionate religious experience. In the eighteenth century, tears became freighted in the context of sentimentalists’ claims to moral self-government and revivalists’ Antinomian or Perfectionist tendencies. A group of New York Presbyterians, for example, published a short tract calling Whitefield to task for, among other things, a sermon describing tears of repentance as themselves salvific.76 Many lay revival conversion narratives followed Whitefield in developing what Henry Scougal’s 1677 devotional manual, reprinted frequently in eighteenth-century New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, described as God’s gift of “a beam of the eternal light” to the saved.77 As Whitefield and Scougal recommend, these lay narratives used episodes of weeping as signs of a convert’s movement from doubt, characterized by silence, into a sense of grace, characterized by song, announcements of joy, or other effusive descriptions of God’s excellence. Frequently authored by creole European men of middling rank, these narratives stage the moment of “awakening” to God’s grace as a singular, metamorphic experience of theosis in which “self”-destruction results in the emergence of an individuated gracious self. Such accounts lead more directly to the development of a modern liberal subjectivity characterized by interiority and a highly individuated psyche, or what William James described as the autonomous unification of a self previously unhappy and divided.78
In the wake of Gilbert Tennent’s inflammatory The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry and Whitefield’s typically self-satisfied description of “Dear Mr. Edwards” weeping “during the whole time” of Whitefield’s second Northampton sermon, Edwards’s tears might even have been taken to endorse demands for a converted clergy.79 Because these demands made conversion the primary qualification for authoritative public religious address, they encouraged forms of lay evangelism that resembled preaching. Indeed, many revival narratives by lay preachers and exhorters dramatize conversion as a tearful movement from tortured silence into bold, “masculine” speech characteristic of an earlier generation of Protestant martyrs. In making this connection between conversion and evangelism, these narratives register the influence of ministers in the evangelical public but also illustrate the evangelical public’s threat to ministers’ traditional monopoly on authoritative religious speech. For example, Samuel Belcher, in a self-written 1740 conversion narrative used to gain full membership in Edwards’s father’s church, charts his spiritual development by naming his attendance of various famous itinerants and echoing their publications. Referring to Edwards’s sermon, Belcher described his terror at falling “into the hands of an angry God … Cry[ing] mightily … in the bitterness of my Soul for mercy.” Then, echoing Whitefield, Belcher “felt my Load Go of and my mouth was Stopt and I Could not utter one word for Some time and I fealt as if my heart was Changed.” In his “Joy and Comfort,” Belcher’s “mouth was opened and [he] Spake forth the praises of God.”80 Though perhaps more typical of men, women also engaged this trope, often in a more embodied manner. Lay preacher Susanna Anthony’s narrative, as published by Edwards’s protégée Samuel Hopkins, retains the martyr’s connection between her experience of pain and “bold” dissenting speech. Anthony insisted she had no irregular affective behaviors, but when Satan tempted her to commit suicide, she “twisted every joint, and strained every nerve; biting my flesh; gnashing my teeth; throwing myself on the floor,” and wringing her hand until it was numb. Her damaged hand, a vivid symbol of many converts’ mediated access to writing, was healed after her experience of God’s grace. Recalling this event, she claims, “often fill[s] my soul with a holy boldness, and my mouth with arguments.”81 Describing a sense of pain and joy engendered by both external torment and an internalized notion of sin and divine perfection, Anthony and other converts ground their “bold” religious speech in the affective experience of suffering and grace.
As these narratives’ frequent invocations of Whitefield indicate, the link between conversion and speech was authorized, in part, by engaging public models of converted subjectivity with which Edwards was at pains to compete. If, as many suspect, Edwards wrote his conversion narrative in 1740 or 1741, he engaged in at least implicit dialogue with Whitefield’s 1740 conversion narrative and the mass “outpourings of faith” sparked by Whitefield’s accompanying preaching tour, whose New England leg Edwards helped arrange. In what would be one of the largest, most coordinated publishing and distribution events of the day, Whitefield’s narrative was attractive and simply available to lay and itinerant revivalists and critics on a perhaps unprecedented scale.82 As with revivalist practice more generally, the outlines of Whitefield’s conversion were conventional, but the details were remarkably charismatic, describing a protean figure haplessly caught up in the spiritual battle between God and the devil.83 Eschewing the rational argumentation and elevated, impersonal tone of much contemporary ministerial publication, Whitefield addressed his “dear Reader” directly, offered mildly salacious details of his sinful preconversion life, endorsed prophetic dreams and direct divine response to prayer, and compared himself to a Foxean martyr.84 But it was his narrative’s framing of evangelical speech as the result of divine inspiration that would prove most problematic for Edwards. After a period of intense self-doubt, sickness, and severe ascetic self-denial, Whitefield received a mysterious “suggestion” that his inexplicable “thirst” resembled Christ’s on the cross. At