Transcript
This morning, the lecture that I'm going to give is dealing with the subject of the Great Awakening and its relationship to the American Revolution. There have been at least two major interpretations of how the Great Awakening affected the American Revolution. The first one is a time-honored one, really. It dates back into the 1920s and still receives a great deal of currency today. And it's chiefly stated in an old book published in the '20s, which is
available today, but it's out of print, Alice Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution. Baldwin argues that out of the split that comes out of the Great Awakening, the split between the revivalists, the evangelical Calvinists, and on the other side, the Arminian rationalist Enlightenment clergy. Out of that split, the Enlightenment rationalist clergy are the leaders in the revolution. And she points to people like Charles Chauncey and Jonathan Mayhew, particularly. Then in the 1960s, a
book by Alan Heimert was published called Religion and the American Mind, in which Heimert argues just exactly the opposite. He says that it was the evangelical Calvinists coming out of the Great Awakening who provided most of the theological justification for the American Revolution. And he suggests in the last few pages, ultimately, for Jacksonian democracy. He says, on the other hand, that these rationalist Enlightenment clergy, who were moving more and more toward Unitarianism, were primarily elitist in
their orientation, not connected with the common people, and therefore not as revolutionary minded as these Calvinist evangelical types. If you want a good, quick orientation to this Heimert thesis, it's contained in the introduction to the Heimert and Miller volume here, entitled The Great Awakening. A third interpretation that, in some respects, I think is a much more persuasive one, is one that's suggested by Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee. Both of these books, incidentally, are available on
paperback, as well as Gaustad, these last three. The other two are hardback. Bushman essentially uses a combination of theological analysis and social psychology to understand some of the changes that are taking place in colonial society during the middle of the 18th century, and how a phenomenon like The Great Awakening can influence the course of developments that ultimately run into the American Revolution. And what I will be doing in this lecture is, in some respects, what Bushman
is suggesting in that book. And the virtue, I think, of Bushman's book is that, in a certain sense, it's less deterministic. You don't have this feeling that, because a person has one point of view or a given set of ideas, he therefore will support the revolution 40 years later or 30 years later. Just for information, the best single, short, very readable book on The Great Awakening is Gaustad, available in paperback. And that will give you probably
one of the best overall pictures of what's going on. Now, there are various ways of cutting into the whole subject of The Great Awakening, but I'd like to focus on one idea, particularly, and that's the idea of ecclesiastical authority. More broadly, it's the whole issue of authority in colonial America, which is, of course, an important subject for the revolution as well. But I'd like to trace the idea of ecclesiastical authority and use that, in a certain
sense, as a case study of how The Great Awakening changes ideas of authority. First, some very basic kind of orientation to The Great Awakening. This awakening that we're talking about is the first Great Awakening. And what we mean by that is, generally, a two or three year period running from 1739 to 1740 or '41. The second Great Awakening is the one that's usually referred to that takes place around the turn of the century, around 1800. Now,
in the first Great Awakening, what was going on, the mass conversions, the revivalism, in a certain sense, this isn't new. Solomon Stoddard here had what he called five great harvests in his church in Southampton, Massachusetts, in which there seemed to be large numbers of people who would be converted and enter the church simultaneously. Jonathan Edwards' famous great revival in Northampton occurred in 1734 to '35. But normally, historians tend to talk about The Great Awakening as something
that takes place in this two year period. And the person that they point to most of all is George Whitfield, an Anglican who is closely associated with the Wesley's. He comes to the United States, and he and a couple of others become known as, well, he becomes known as the Great Itinerant. And he goes all the way up and down the eastern coast, preaching at various points. And he becomes known particularly for the eloquence and power
of his sermons. It was said at the time, it's probably apocryphal, but it was said at the time that his eloquence was so great, he could make women weep simply by saying Mesopotamia. And when he preached in Philadelphia, he was only in his late 20s at the time. But there's a fascinating section in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography when he calculates the size of the crowd that Whitfield was preaching to out of doors. And it's interesting, simply for
the sheer size of it, Franklin calculates that there were probably 20,000 people there. And but it's also interesting as a particular twist of Franklin's mind that in going to this great revival, he was not only taken by what Whitfield was saying, but by how many people were there. And so he walked around the circumference of the crowd and figured out how many people would be per square foot. And so while the revival's going on, Franklin,
with his sort of scientific turn of mind, is measuring the size of the crowd. Now, it's referred to as a great awakening because it was extensive in geographical terms. It seems that this was something that was taking place not only in New England or in the Middle Colonies or the South, but also in Europe, in Scandinavia, England, and the low country in Europe, and even into the heart of Europe itself, Germany. It was also extensive in
social terms. It's been tried, but it's very difficult to determine whether these conversions all came from a particular social class. They came from the rich as well as the poor. And there's no way of treating this in a certain sense as a class phenomenon. And it was also an awakening in the sense that it was a tremendous spur to the revitalization of religious life in the American colonies. There's an enormous increase in the number of new
churches and the growth of churches already established. But now to this issue of authority. In trying to discuss the subject of authority, I think we have to keep in mind some characteristics of colonial society, some of which Professor Craven pointed out on Monday night. First of all, this was a society which was deferential. And what we mean by that was that authority was always something which was based, in a certain sense, on a state of nature.
If you were wealthy, if you had good family ties, good lineage, authority was, by the act of being born into such a situation, authority was conferred upon you. It was not something earned or deserved because of ability. Deferential. The poor, the deferring to the authority of the rich and the powerful. It was also a society which was divided between north and south, rich and poor, the established areas versus, in a certain sense, the frontier areas. But
these divisions within the society, in a certain sense, are kept under control by the whole idea of deference. By the time we reached the period of the middle of the 18th century, we've also had a period of enormous expansion in population, a real explosion, as Professor Craven pointed out. These were areas growing very, very rapidly. And finally, this was a society with a family structure that was undergoing tremendous amounts of change. The study of this is
only beginning to be done now. And the significance of the changes are not altogether clear. But one very clear thing that is taking place in colonial American society is that patriarchal authority is being undermined, undermined primarily by the abolition of primogeniture. Now, this isn't something that's being abolished by law, but it's being abolished primarily by custom. Primogeniture is the old practice of giving all of the estate to, when you die, to your eldest son. And this
was the established practice in England. And given the tremendous availability of land in the colonies throughout the 17th century, you see a steady erosion of the practice of primogeniture, which automatically means that the power of the father to deed over huge amounts of land is being undermined consistently. Now, I'll try to explain some of the implications of these four characteristics as we deal specifically with the issue of ecclesiastical authority. When the Puritans arrived in the 1620s
and 1630s, they, along with virtually every other group that come to the colonies during the 17th century, were faced with a very, very unique situation. European Christianity had assumed and people had experienced that by the act of being born, one became a member of the church. An established church always meant, in a certain sense, that you were a member, from cradle to grave. In migrating to the New World, they confronted a very new situation, one in
which it was, they had no established church. And so the question of the nature of the church figures as one of the most important questions in American religious history during the colonial period. And it has tremendous implications for the nature of the society as well. They had to ask themselves, who can be admitted to membership? Who can be admitted to the sacraments? How are we going to organize a church? And in organizing their church, the Puritans
tried really to do two things simultaneously, two contradictory things. In one sense, they were trying to work within the collapse of a society, the abolition of medieval society. And in that society, a church, the Roman Catholic Church, had been the sole mediator of God's grace to people. Now, what the Puritans tried to do is to make God sovereign, mediating grace to whomever he wished, and shrouding his grace in a mystery. And yet, at the same time,
they tried in some way to deal with the whole question of the church. They tried to institutionalize the means of grace so that it became orderly and comprehensible, and in a certain sense, predictable. Now, at the same time that they're trying to set up this worldly institution of the church, they're also insisting on a separation from it, so that the contradiction in their attempt is to be in the world, but not of it. What they hit
upon was the idea of the covenant, specifically a church covenant. But in the framework of theology, this became known as the covenant theology. Essentially, this is an agreement between God and human beings. In exchange for obedience, God will grant salvation to human beings. One effect that this has is to reduce the anxiety about your salvation. If there is a clear cut agreement, and the terms of it are rather clearly spelled out, you're no longer as anxious
about your salvation as you were before. Now, the corollary to that kind of covenant with God is the church covenant. People bound themselves together to promote right worship and bound to God in common fellowship. Let me read you the covenant for the Charleston Church in Boston in 1630. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in obedience to his holy will and divine ordinance, we whose names are here underwritten, being by his most wise and
good providence brought together into this part of America in the Bay of Massachusetts, and desire us to unite ourselves into one congregation or church under the Lord Jesus Christ, our head in such sort as become of all those whom he hath redeemed and sanctified to himself, do hereby and solemnly and religiously, as in his most holy presence, promise and bind ourselves to walk in all our ways according to the rule of the gospel and in sincere
conformity to his holy ordinances and in mutual love and respect to each other so near as God shall give us grace. And then they sign their names. That's the church. You get people together and you sign your names and you take a pledge. Now, there are three things to keep in mind about this. This is really an extraordinary development in church history. First of all, it's unlike anything that happens prior to this in the Christian church.
As I've said before, you were born into the church. You didn't decide to join it freely. You didn't have to take an oath. You didn't sign your name. This is a free act that people take. Secondly, there is no mention whatsoever of the mission of the church to spread the gospel. This is non-evangelical in its orientation. They're not talking about converting the Indians. They're not talking about even converting others who may come over. They're binding
themselves together. And third, the church and the congregation are synonymous. There's no talk here about the church being broader than this individual congregation. Rather, they are the church, the people of God. And in a certain sense, all other churches are irrelevant. Now, how do you organize a covenanted church, a gathered church of the faithful? They hit upon primarily two different ways in New England, known as the separatist way and the New England way. Both of them,
keep in mind, are congregational. They're not talking here about super congregational forms of government in which there's authority in the church beyond the local congregation. The congregation is the sole governing unit, the sole unit of authority. The first group is the separatists. This is the group that lands in Plymouth, the famous pilgrims in 1620. And they came on the Mayflower from what they called that goodly and pleasant city of Leiden in the Netherlands. And they're called
separatists for two reasons. First of all, they objected most strongly to the idea or the basic principle of the Anglican Church that you were a member of a given parish by virtue of living within its geographical bounds. As you know, England, even today, for the Church of England, is divided up into all sorts of geographical areas. And simply by living in that area, you become a member of that particular parish. The separatists said, no, that is
not a good enough indication of what it means to be a Christian. Secondly, they had really despaired of trying to reform the Church of England from within. And so they, like the counterculture of the 1960s, were saying the establishment is totally corrupt. We've got to separate ourselves completely and get ourselves away from the Church of England and establish a pure form of society and a pure church. They also believed that the believers and the non-believers
had to be separated and that the Church became the agency for doing that. The Church becomes the way of defining the difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. Now, obviously, this raises a terribly difficult question about how you do that separation. How do you decide who's a believer and who's a non-believer? And they hit upon three criteria. First of all, they said that you had to confess your faith. And what they meant by that
was a statement in which you indicated that you understood the doctrine of the Church. This was a heavily doctrinal statement that you made indicating you knew who Jesus Christ was, what his salvation meant, what the Holy Spirit was, what the Church was, et cetera. Now, later on, Puritans called this historical faith or general faith, and they contrasted with saving faith. The difference is that this statement of faith is primarily one based on understanding what you know,
your reason is important here. The second criterion that they said was that you had to give a second confession of faith. And this was, in a certain sense, more personal. You had to demonstrate in the second confession that you believed what you understood. It wasn't just something that you could spot out, like Einstein's theory of relativity, but you really understood it in the sense of believing it with all your heart. And finally, you had to demonstrate
it in some way in good behavior. You couldn't say one thing and then go out and commit adultery or get drunk in the local tavern. The separatist pastor in Amsterdam, John Smith, described this system very, very simply in the three points that I mentioned. He said, the way of receiving in of members is faith testified by obedience. Faith is the knowledge of the doctrine of salvation by Christ. Obedience is a godly, righteous, and sober life. Now,
what's important here is external evidence, outward, visible behavior, openly expressed opinions, not the presence or absence of what the Puritans later call saving faith. These later Puritans who come in the 1630s are known as the non-separating congregationalists. These are the ones who create what is known as the New England Way. They arrive on the ship Arbella at Massachusetts Bay in 1630. And by the end of the year, 2,000 settlers had come to Massachusetts Bay.
Like the separatists, this group believed in congregational organization. But they considered the churches in England to be true churches. That is, they were not totally despairing of the possibilities of converting the Church of England to their views. But they did see the Church of England as corrupt. And so they, in a sense, were on the classic phrase, and errand into the wilderness. They were going forth to set up a new church, a church which would be
pure. And when the time was right, they would return to England with their pure church and establish it. Now, before leaving England, this group of Puritans didn't demand this idea of saving grace as a requirement of salvation. That is, they didn't require people to talk about their conversion experience. And this is the main idea of saving grace, a conversion experience. Instead, this group of Puritans to emphasize the stages of conversion. It wasn't just one experience, but
several experiences. And they talked particularly about preparation for salvation. And in this, they were following primarily the Puritan theologian William Perkins, who outlined 10 different stages in the whole idea of salvation and conversion. The first four of Perkins' stages deal with something that people can do. You can, in a certain sense, work your way up the ladder to being converted. And the last six are sort of when God takes over and you don't have as much
choice in the matter anymore. Now, the interesting thing about these stages is that they, in a certain sense, go up and down. You have a bad experience and then God steps in, but then you have even a worse experience and God steps in. And every time you sort of fall down, you rise higher. But this sort of seesaw effect through the conversion process is also something that produces anxiety. There's nothing very permanent about conversion when you
have this kind of framework. It's sort of perpetual conversion. And what they always said was that the people who were sure of their salvation were the people who really weren't saved. In other words, the way to really be sure of your salvation was always to be unsure. And you could never really count on it. One Puritan put it this way. The faithful have not this assurance so perfect, but they are oft troubled with doubts and fears.
But they have this false assurance, but they that have this false assurance are most confident and never have any doubts. So if you're totally convinced of your salvation, then you ought to start asking questions about it. Now, the result is that you have in Puritanism this obsession with introspection and the great tradition of Puritan diaries of examining one's soul and all the rest is in large measure due to this whole pattern. And the emphasis in this
non-separating congregationalist before they leave from England is still on the idea of proper belief and outward obedience. In this respect, they're no different from the separatists. Now, when they come over to the New World and to Massachusetts Bay, something very dramatic happens. At first, they undoubtedly used the practice that was used at Plymouth, outward obedience, outward confession of faith, no conversion experience being necessary. But very quickly, they move to this style of requiring a conversion
experience as being necessary. Now, the way in which people join the church after this became the crucial test is interesting. First of all, they had to present themselves to the elders who then made a judgment about who was really serious about this and who was really putting people on. And then the members of the church were, in a certain sense, called as character witnesses. They were called in to testify whether John Smith was a law-abiding
citizen, whether he beat his wife, whether he mistreated his cattle, et cetera. And several would usually testify about each person coming into the church. And after they got through this preliminary screening, first the elders and then having people tell about them, then they were presented to the congregation. And there, they would give their conversion experience. They would tell about how they were converted. And if they were too shy or too embarrassed, the elders would do it
for them. But somewhere along the line, somebody had to tell about the person's conversion experience. And sometimes these narrations became somewhat bizarre. One person, Captain John Underhill, sought to become a member by telling the congregation that he had experienced saving grace while enjoying a pipe full of tobacco. And oftentimes, the narrations would go on and on and on as they do oftentimes in churches where this is still practiced today. And several of the ministers tried, in
a certain sense, to give the people a little form that they could follow so that they wouldn't go rambling on and on and on forever. Now, if the majority approved of the idea or approved of this conversion account, then the prospective member gave the profession of belief, a kind of summary of the Apostles' Creed. And then he or she would be admitted to the church. Now, the contrast between these two different ways, the New England way
and the separatist way, is very, very sharp. In the separatist churches, you could become a member by an act of will. It was something that you could do. All you had to do is to agree to certain doctrines and to live an outwardly moral life. But in New England, and specifically in Massachusetts, you had to have an experience which was beyond your ability to achieve. This was something that God gave to you, a conversion experience. You
couldn't somehow grind yourself up to achieving that sort of thing. It had to be handed out by God. Now, obviously, in the second way, which became the predominant pattern of church membership, there are a number of problems. The first is how you can tell what a genuine experience is. How do you know when people aren't just giving you a story? And a second problem is, how can the church really serve God by converting sinners if the
only ones who can attend church and receive the sacraments are those who are already saved? How do you, in a certain sense, increase the size of the church, bring people into it if the only people who can attend and receive the sacraments are the ones who are already in? This becomes particularly important in the children of believers. What do you do with a child who is born to members of the church but who has not had
a conversion experience because he or she is still dirtying diapers or playing with dolls or doing any number of things? Now, the result quickly became, in New England, what the Puritans called declension. Now, this word has a variety of meanings, but in its most obvious sense, means a decline, a kind of falling off in zeal from the original days of the founders of the colonies when all of the people were knit together and virtually all the
members were members of the church. But it also involves a disintegration of the organic, utopian community that they had all envisaged when everybody was a member of the church. When you have an increase in the population from a couple of thousand in 1630 to over 20,000 in 1640, it was impossible for the community to really retain this kind of close-knit sense that they had all expected. Finally, there was a great deal of alarm in
Massachusetts and in New England about their increasing wealth. As Zip mentioned at the dinner, this the people in the New World were noted for their particularly good diet. And closely related to that diet was the wealth that they were able to achieve within a very, very short period of time. One Puritan put it that the members of the community had exchanged their souls for a mess of American pottage. Their stomachs were full and they were happy
and they had lost the original zeal. Now, to deal with this declension, this falling away, the disintegration of the community, they tried a number of different solutions. The first one was the obvious one. You simply make everybody attend church. And in 1646, the civil government made church attendance a requirement. Now, that didn't satisfy anything, as most of you know, who have been associated with institutions where you have required a chapel. Simply by getting a warm body
into a church building doesn't make them any more religious or any better or make them converted. And it was a particular problem in New England because most of the sermons of this period are designed primarily toward those who are already saved. There are a few exceptions. But in general, the idea is to speak to the converted, not to preach to the unconverted. Once again, non-evangelical, non-revivalistic. A second solution that they hit upon was the
Baptist solution. Very quickly in the 1630s, as you know, Roger Williams goes off to Rhode Island. Baptists start congregating there. And a basically Baptist approach to the problem of church membership emerges. And that is, you deal only with adult believers. You don't even worry about the problem of the unconverted child. And you simply have adult believers baptism. But the Puritans in Massachusetts still clung to the idea that it was possible in a certain sense to grow
up in the church. They were still living within the old English idea of being born into the church. And they held onto that. And so what they did was to formulate what they called the Cambridge Platform of 1648. And what they said there was that the child of a member had to be subjected to the same tests for membership as anyone else. Now, this worked for a while. But it became complicated when you had children of
members of the church who, in turn, had children before they had a conversion experience. So it's, in a certain sense, this third generation that presents a particular problem. They continued to baptize the children of members, even though they didn't have a conversion experience. But then these nonmembers, the second generation, came in when they had children and said, will you baptize my child? And there the problem arose. How do you baptize the child of a nonmember? And
the fourth way of solving it, which worked fairly well for nearly a half century, was something that eventually became known as the halfway covenant that the churches agreed to in 1662. They didn't call it the halfway covenant at the time, but this is something that emerged afterwards. And what the halfway covenant did was to say that the children of those who were not members could be baptized, but these children couldn't receive the Lord's Supper. And they
couldn't vote in church affairs. So that you were, in a certain sense, a halfway member. You could be baptized, but until you had the conversion experience, you couldn't receive the Lord's Supper. Now, there have been a variety of interpretations of this very important decision about church membership. Perry Miller, the famous historian of Puritanism, says that this is a clear indication of declension, of the falling away of the zeal of the community disintegration. And he says that
in the midst of this period, you see the development of what they called a jeremiad, which is a particular form of sermon. Taken, obviously, from the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament. And the jeremiad bemoans the sins of the community and tries to call people back to their previous state of faithfulness to God. And what Miller says is that these jeremiads were largely a psychological expiation of guilt, because you had the minister up there denouncing you
for making money. You could therefore go out on Monday morning and send a new shipment off to the West Indies so that people could become rich and yet, in a certain sense, feel that they were not going through, not being sinful at the same time. In contrast to Miller's interpretation, Edmund Morgan and a fellow by the name of Robert Pope have said almost exactly the opposite. They say that the halfway covenant indicates there's no indication of
declension there, the change in church membership. What it does indicate is that the laypeople in the church were more conservative than the clergy and that they wanted to maintain a tighter control over the use of church membership. And the way they prove that is that you would think that this new, more flexible, looser requirements for church membership would produce many more members of the church. And yet, they show that it takes about 25 years for the
halfway covenant to begin to be used in local congregations, that the laypeople were resisting the idea that the church should be open to everybody. And what they're saying is that Miller is wrong when he says that the halfway covenant is an attempt by the clergy to maintain control of the people by bringing them all in. Instead, they say it's really an attempt by the laypeople to seize control over clerical power. Now, I realize that this is
getting rather complicated at this point, but the main lesson, I think, that comes out of this is that in the pattern of deciding what the nature of the church is, in determining what the church is going to be, there's a very strong correlation, particularly in American church history, of loose membership and greater authority for the clergy. If you have loose requirements for membership, you generally have churches where clergy are the most powerful figures in the church.
If you have strict requirements for membership, you have a clergy that is much more dependent upon the laity for control. Now, this expanded vision of ministerial authority inherent in the looser structure of the church develops very, very rapidly during the late 17th century and 18th century. You have the development of people like Solomon Stoddard, who's known as the pope of the Connecticut River Valley. He is very, very powerful. And you see similar instances of ministers totally
dominating the lives of their congregation as you loosen up the membership of the church. You also see the church moving much more aggressively into the area of education. This is the era, the late 17th, early 18th century, when Yale is established and compulsory public education is made a law in Massachusetts. And the clergy, in a certain sense, having lost some of the church, having lost some of the definition as an agency for salvation in society, takes
over another role of education. And just incidentally, I'd suggest that this is still where most churches continue to try to make their mission felt. They don't see themselves primarily, at least many of the main line churches, as agents of salvation in society, but really, when it comes right down to it, serving a function of education and of nurture. Finally, by the time of the Great Awakening, you have the development of open communion, where regardless of whether
you've been baptized or not, whether you've had saving grace or not, whether you've had a conversion experience or not, you're admitted to the Lord's Supper. And this is the context for the Great Awakening. You have a church trying to maintain its spiritual authority through the clergy and through ecclesiastical structures. You have a more rationalistic theology. The Enlightenment that Dr. Stroh talked about is beginning to make itself felt in the early 18th century, particularly in theology. And
what the Puritans had talked about in the conviction of saving grace, the conviction of sin, now becomes the convincing of people, the attempt to impart salvation by persuasion rather than a particular experience. And the Great Awakening in this context becomes a revolution in the way people thought about church order, about the way they thought about authority. And it's a revolution in both senses of the word. First of all, it's a turning back to the early Puritan
idea that you have to have a conversion experience before you can join the church. But it's not just a hearkening back for the difference between the conversions that the Puritans talked about and the conversion experience that emerges during the awakening is really very fundamental and crucial. In one sense, the Puritans always talked about conversion as something to be longed for, something that they didn't have but they wanted to get. It's a looking back toward something that
they wanted to regain. The awakeners, and especially Edwards, saw conversion as something to be looked forward to, something to be anticipated. There's a real difference in orientation away from the past and toward the future. Above all, conversion was an experience that the believer had with God. And though it might come while you were listening to Whitefield or Edwards or one of the tenants, William or Gilbert tenant here in New Jersey, the fact of the matter is
that the radicalness of the idea of justification by faith alone, central tenant of the Reformation, that idea was finally coming to its logical conclusion in the Great Awakening. If your experience was directly with God, a direct conversion experience, you didn't need any clergy. You didn't need any church. Experience of God was the key. What then did the Great Awakening do to this concept of authority? First of all, it undermined the authority of the clergy. Now, how
did it do that? First of all, the emphasis was on experience through God and the Holy Spirit. One of the classic examples is the diary of David Brainerd, in which he outlines how he was converted as a student at Yale. Brainerd, incidentally, spent most of his life as a missionary to the Indians, about 15 miles from here, in Cranberry. And what Brainerd emphasizes is that he has a direct relationship with God. He's not talking about how
he was led to Christ by the 18th century equivalent of Billy Graham or Dwight Moody or somebody like that. He's talking about how he was converted by God. Theologically, the emphasis was that salvation couldn't be achieved by any kind of obedience to the law. You simply can't make it on your own. If you obey the Ten Commandments, that's still not enough. If you live a good life, that's not enough. All that was good enough for a
century earlier, but it's no longer enough. And Edwards specifically says that the experience of grace is not according to what he called that old legal scheme. The Great Awakening locates salvation in an experience, and it's not to be achieved by proper understanding of the scriptures or attendance at church or reading the Bible or praying regularly. And what you see in The Great Awakening is a fundamental split that characterizes virtually all of subsequent American Protestantism between education
and nurture on the one hand and experience and inward piety on the other. Two very, very different approaches to what it means to be saved. Now inevitably, this conferred more and more power on the laity. Ministers are examined for their experiences, their piety, not their training or their learning. And there are fascinating transcripts of ministers who graduate from Yale or Harvard who are convinced that they're ready for the ministry but who go out into local congregations,
and the congregations begin to ask them, tell us about your conversion experience. And they keep pushing them and pushing them and pushing them until finally, the congregation either has the assurance that they're really dealing with someone who was converted, or they say, we're sorry. You simply haven't had the experience. Gilbert Tennant, a famous sermon, indicates what's going on here. The title of the sermon is The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry. And what he's pointing to is
the idea that a church cannot be properly led unless it has a converted minister at its head. But the very fact that a sermon like that couldn't be preached is itself an attack on clerical authority. Here is one of the clergy attacking the clergy from within, insisting on conversion as the only way that a minister can be properly a minister. And finally, and something that is most obvious but least emphasized, it seems to me, is that
this conversion experience was violent and sudden in virtually every case. And by being violent and sudden, you couldn't program it. You couldn't institutionalize it. As Presbyterians like to say, you'd like it to be done decently and in order, but you can't do conversion experiences that way. Later on in the 19th century, there's an attempt to do that. But conversion by its nature, if it's going to come directly from God, means an obliteration of institutions and mediators
along the way. Now, the awakening also undermines ecclesiastical structures. And how did it do that? Very quickly. First of all, the churches were divided from within. The Congregationalists broke up into old lights and new lights. The Presbyterians broke into old sides and new sides. Virtually every denomination was, in a certain sense, broken into two by the tremendous controversy aroused by the Great Awakening. It also had a tendency to break down denominational distinctions. If the chief criteria
for being a Christian was this conversion experience, and if you got it from Whitefield, who would preach in any church that give him the use of the pulpit, it really didn't matter whether you were Baptist or Presbyterian or Dutch Reformed or German Reformed or anything else. The conversion experience itself was fundamental. It also produced a fundamental reorganization of the churches. In Presbyterianism, it eventually meant that the Presbyterian church and the colonies was organized on the unit
of the Presbytery being the strongest unit of power. In other words, power primarily at the local level. In contrast to Scotland, where the General Assembly was the chief unit of power and the Presbyteries were rather weak. And the Great Awakening is one fundamental reason why the church is reorganized like this. In Congregationalism, it cut short a move toward Presbyterianism. After the Great Awakening, it's very difficult for the Congregationalists to try to talk about what they called
associations of churches, a kind of semi-Presbyterianism. And they're moving very much back toward the idea of independent, separate congregations where the unit of power is located there. And finally, it has a unifying effect in terms of the churches in the sense that the unification takes place in a certain sense outside of traditional ecclesiastical institutions. I feel related to a friend in Connecticut because he's had the same experience that I have. And he, in turn, feels
related to a person in Georgia because of the experience which he has had. And so it's cutting across geographical boundaries, across ecclesiastical boundaries, and everything else. Now, on the surface, this is hardly a social revolution. All of this could have taken place without affecting the social order at all. In fact, had it occurred in a stable society, the Great Awakening would have been the first in a series of revivals in American society which, like the revival
of the 1950s, comes and goes and hardly makes any kind of social difference. But the fact is that the Great Awakening didn't take place in a stable society but in an unstable one. There are tremendous increases in population immediately prior to the Great Awakening. Some very quick statistics on just the 20-year period from 1720 to 1740. Massachusetts grows from 91,000 to 151,000. Connecticut goes from 58,000 to 90,000. Virginia goes from
87,000 to 180,000. New Jersey goes from 30,000 to 51,000. Now, that kind of rapid population growth, as any of you know who live in suburbs or in areas where there's a huge influx of people over a very short period of time, has a tremendously disruptive effect. There's an enormous growth of towns. And the towns that are founded approximately 30 years before the awakening are the ones that are most susceptible to the revivals when
they break out. There's tremendous prosperity prompted by that kind of population increase. And there's a lot of pressure on the land. More people wanting more land and the pressures to get land become greater and greater. There's also increasing debt. In Connecticut, for example, the number of debt cases triples between 1700 and 1730. Hi, Jim. We'll be right with you. And in this context, the Great Awakening has at least revolutionary potential. It's not explicit. But in a
particular historical context, it could be. It speeds the process of transformation away from a society in which authority is deferential to one in which authority is earned or achieved. It's no longer artificial. In other words, if your experience with God, the highest authority in human life, is something that is direct and personal, you can begin to make new kinds of demands upon the social authority in your life. This is an implication. And it takes a while
to work itself out. But this new dimension, in a certain sense, to the Christian life brings about a rethinking of the nature of social authority as well so that when you get into the 1760s and 1770s and people are demanding, in a certain sense, representation for their taxation, this is a new kind of demand to be made about a personal relationship with authority. Well, sorry to run on. I think we can break for 10 or 15
minutes. The Moravians have much closer ties to them, yes. Definitely. Do historians accept that the Moravians? Bacchus is kind of a spokesman for Isaac Bacchus for the American Church. He developed, where was it, Connecticut or Western Massachusetts? Rhode Island. Or was it Rhode Island? Was he out of Rhode Island? Yeah. Well, and Roger Williams is also, in some ways, the founder of the Baptist Church. And it was his perfectionist, pluralistic tendencies that caused him to break
the mainstream and to be exiled out of the puritan establishment. He challenged the right of the English crown to grant lands in America because they belonged to Indians. He was made a person and I'm granted on a political basis alone with everybody. You may have had reference to these people as the losers, when you look at the losers in the good company, but they're not losers in the wrong way. No, no. My point is that history
treats them as losers. They were losers in their time. Yes, I mean, Thomas More losing his head, you can't lose much more than that, really. Yes, but nevertheless, Thomas More is a beautiful example, too. I think it's somewhat, I have a definite sympathy for Thomas More. Most people, unfortunately, associate the death of Thomas More with the particular problem of Henry VIII. Henry has marital problems of some enormous proportion. We find people to associate the death of
Thomas More with his particular reluctance to give to the king in particular setting that has arrived now as a result of Anne Boleyn's presence there. Well, Thomas More is a humanist. He's, on top of that, a brilliant lawyer. And he's a man with an immense sense of humor. Nobody with that kind of character trait will go to the scaffold for a mistress of the queen or a mistress of the king. Nobody. Thomas More goes to the
scaffold not because the king has a mistress. The man is above average intelligence. He knows that something like that is as common as beggars in London. That's not the problem. Thomas More goes to the scaffold because the king of England, Henry VIII, unlike what the reform movement intellectually and religiously had done on the continent, the king in England says, I want you, the English people, to be a subject to the crown. I want you to be
a subject. And Thomas More said, no, I won't. Thomas More said, I am a citizen. That's what he gets out of his Renaissance interest and of his sympathies with the reform movement on the continent. He wants to be a citizen. And the king insists that he has to be a subject. That's why he thinks it's worthwhile to go to the scaffold. But not for Anne Boleyn. I mean. Was his loyalty with the pope rather than with
the king as the head of the church? He never stated that kind of thing. Throughout the trial, you will never find a remark to that. But he will refuse to be a subject to the king. You said Trouillus is an Anabaptist. No, no, no. Michael, he is, when we talk about Anabaptist, what we call rational evangelists, we have a number of sporadic incidences in Europe. And Michael Servetus is one of the last category. He is somewhat
alone, too. Yeah, but the Reformation. Castello and Servetus are. Do you find that they made a mistake in killing them? Yes. Beza taught, however, it was a punishment of God, said so. No, Michael Servetus and Castello are one of the painful incidents, I think. The Hunted Heretic, a beautiful book by Bainton. Was his thinking so different from Calvin's? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He had some things to say about the Trinity that made Calvin jump up and
down for a long time. You know what I mean? He did it with the taste of it. He was, and then he had a sneak way of moving around. He was a doctor in France. And then, you know, a plumber in Spain, and then an artist in Italy, and he moved around in a different disguise, and Calvin was not exactly appreciative of that kind of performance either. Castello, the same thing. Delightful characters, but Michael Servetus is
just, these people are actually, they are losers again, but they are making the most incredible contribution to what eventually will come out as tolerance. You know, our acceptance of this kind of pluralism. When you spoke with me on the back, you seem to stress the idea of universal Christian. And then you went on to say that it's ironic that they have died out, strikingly, that they have been worshipped in Greenies. Do you mean in present-day
society that there are groups in Siberia who... And in North Dakota, yeah, who are still related. But the idea of universal Christian, is that synonymous with lay and Christian? That is to say, the distinction between lay and cleric is meaningless by now. Yes, it is. Yes, we are all priests. Because, I mean, apparently, Jesus Christ was a layman. Groups like the Monarchs and the Gators still practice lay and Christian. Yeah, but theologically, it goes farther than
that. It's not the distinction between, it's no longer meaningful to talk about lay ministry within an Anabaptist community, because everybody is a minister. Everybody is. And Luther started off, too, in the sense that he made a possibility by suggesting that the church is where the community of believers is. It's what Luther will emphasize, right? Now, Calvin will go even further in this. All of them will give the theological hints, and at time, will express it, not
from the very start, but in sequence, will accept the universal priesthood. But the Anabaptists are the only ones who persist in making this universal priesthood indeed, available to all. That is to say, child and woman can stand up, because we have universal suffrage for many years in Belgium, which meant that some men could vote. That was our universal suffrage. The universality occasionally needs some definition. We have universal suffrage here, too, and half of the population can
still not vote, because they are too young. Universality needs to be explained, but in the Anabaptist case, they were quite serious about this. That is to say, after they had been baptized as adults. And we find that there are still communities, is it North Dakota? What are you talking about, the Duke of Guards, or what? North Dakota and the province in Canada that is bordering. Not the country. The Duke of Guards are in Canada, I think
there's some in North Dakota. Some of them are gonna go back to Siberia for Canada. They had some trouble during the '50s. They had some trouble during the '50s, because they emphasize communal living, which in the mid-'50s, I understand, had a tendency to be associated with communism in this country. In that context, these people suffered somewhat from their neighborhood. They're extraordinary farmers, do very well. There's no location of clergy. Baptism is the sole sacrament. But
it has not died out in the field. Oh, no. Oh, I have heard several Presbyterians who are giving reference to baptism as the ordination of the individual. Introducing them in the priesthood. I do that all the time when I baptize people. Insofar as it, in some of the theology where it can be read as an introduction into the sainthood of believers, obviously the distinction between the saint and the minister at that time becomes a little bit
obfuscating, and you can as well identify. But there are so many differences in terms of geographical descriptions of some of these. I find my familiarity with Roman Catholicism from back home didn't help me at all when I saw it here. I think Protestant theology goes from priesthood, sainthood, apostleship, to sacramentalization of the individual. Yeah, except, see, by the time you accept it, we may end up in a Reformation debate here if you don't. Well, I'm gonna
suggest that you end it informally. We have some cold drinks and some cookies here. And we have a few minutes, Dr. Strull is not here yet. And so help yourself. Thank you, it was fascinating. Thank you. Yes, let me thank you for the group. Thank you. Mark, do you want a cold drink here? I think so. Well, why don't you? I'm outside. It's gonna be the right thing to do. Oh, it's about the right thing to
do here, it's like. In fact, if it's in writing. Is that the small one, sir? No, that's yours. That's my Apple joke, sir, that's mine, thank you. And what I'm doing right now is... Oh, that's not the wrong one, yeah. That's okay, looks fine, yeah. But if you can't touch these, that's not the right thing to do. They're right here. It's not the right thing to do. We want to hear it, that's the right thing to
do. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, you gotta finish these up. You pick something up for me. Well. There's work, we probably can't. It's simply good to say that in every day, every season, we're going to go back to the end, liberty, and reintegration, right? This is it. That's the interesting thing, is you're writing to yourself. It's a big part of your life. It's a big part of your government life. What point was it? Some of it
is going in the wrong direction. Yes. Some of it is done on the principle of natural law. Some of it is done on the principle of regulation. Some of it is done on, you know. And that's where the dispute comes in, and that's where the talent comes in to be advocated. Worth and mind, worth and mind. Okay, and then she's talking about the, you know, the minutes to five, before the other agreement on provocation, not to
be loyal. Oh, man. Of course. That's a pivotal one. And some of these writings are related to that. That's why I like these three guys, you know, because they're rare to think about. Thank you very much. I think that in the long run, I think that the French have a better knack for compromise than the Anglo-Saxons. It's a thing that when finally they have a problem, they've lifted up somehow to the level of abstraction, very
transient, in peace. In the meantime, you don't have to resolve anything. I have to ask the question. In terms of economics, to go with their cultural forms, any kind of competition, listen to the level of abstraction. The French are pleased with one another. So we turn to be fantastic. I mean, the chair is still not so likely. I don't think it was the chair. Even when they were being a chair, I mean, by the kings or
armies, they were saying, they were still loyal, okay? Yeah. Never mind. The answer is very quickly, it's got down to very specific issues. That doesn't matter. It's important in the prayer book. I recognize that. So if you can apply, we had to take this one. You may not forget the things that he means to be a physician. Which I provided him. I told him. I told him it was coming from a lawyer. Okay? Which is something
that the French don't need to know. Right? Right. Some cold sodas on the floor over there. We've got a few moments right over here. I have the honor again today to again introduce another one of my colleagues. Dr. Guy Stroh's training is, I think, completely as a secular scholar. He's a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Ryder College. Among other things that he has done during his illustrious career, he has
been the state president for the AAUP. And he is the author of a textbook in American philosophy. He's presented papers on numerous occasions and published articles and has been one of our teachers for our excellence in the classroom. Dr. Stroh is going to talk today about the enlightenment in America. And I give you Dr. Guy Stroh. Okay, thank you. I'd like to present a number of points concerning the American enlightenment. And then I understand the matter
would be turned over then for discussion or questions as you would feel free to discuss these matters. My interest in the American enlightenment is principally philosophical. And that is broad enough, I think, to in some way or other take in your interests. And I hope that the number of things I call your attention to will perhaps spurn some thought and discussion of these topics. The American enlightenment as we look at it in terms of a period
of time is roughly the last half of the 18th century, 1750, on into perhaps the early part of the 19th century. And it is primarily, as far as intellectual enlightenment is concerned, it is a pragmatic, humanistic, and social philosophy that I think is preeminent. And what I mean by a pragmatic, humanistic, and social philosophy that we find during the American enlightenment is first of all a concern with action rather than speculation, and a concern with man
rather than pure abstract ideas. All of the enlightenment figures, Franklin, Jefferson, Payne, are all themselves concerned with man and concerned with forms of action that will lead to the improvement and enlightenment of man's position in the scheme of things. Prior to 1750 in America, American thought was clearly dominated by religion, theology, some people like to use one catch-all word, Puritanism. We can use that term to talk about the Puritan mind. For the Puritan mind, prior
to 1750, man, nature, science, society, were all secondary or subservient to a God-centered vision of the universe. Now one thing I think the scholars agreed on is that the enlightenment helped, or was the principle factor in turning this around. The enlightenment succeeded in certain ways at least of making the secular overshadow the divine. Man, nature, society, politics, in many ways were separated from divine influence and intervention. Consequently, the men of the enlightenment, such men as
Franklin, Jefferson, Payne, Benjamin Rush, there are a number of them, were even charged with atheism. To some individuals, or maybe to many individuals, the free thinking and ideas of the enlightenment figures sometimes called natural religion in terms of their thinking or deism, this deism seemed to diminish or dispense with the divine being altogether. For some individuals who were opposed to deism, opposed to any form of natural religion, or making the divine not the center of things
but secondary to a number of secular matters. Therefore, to a certain extent, the critics, many of the critics of the deists, of the American deists, such as Jefferson, Franklin, Payne, to the critics, to many critics, the divine appeared as merely a ceremonial expression. When they talked about a divine being or a god as creating the universe, they seemed to use the notion of a god or a divine being as a ceremonial expression. And the so-called
law of nature became the authoritative term within their deism. Although the deists, as I would refer to them, Jefferson, Payne, and so on, do use the term god or talk about a divine being in their philosophies, the authoritative materials within their thinking seems to pertain to a law of nature that the divine being is responsible for and creates, but then it is the law of nature or laws of nature that take over, and these are the
things that are important for man to understand and work within the framework of these physical laws as well as moral laws. To make this more concrete and to bring this into better focus, I think this may be best seen in contrasting Jonathan Edwards with the views of Thomas Jefferson. Jonathan Edwards is certainly not the only Puritan theologian, but he is the most brilliant. And Jefferson is not the only deist or enlightenment figure, but in many ways,
he's the most representative, and certainly he is representative. Whether he's most representative, perhaps open to argument, certainly he is representative. Now, Edwards certainly was an enlightened theologian, and therefore one might wonder, well, why not treat Edwards himself as part of the American enlightenment, as some scholars do. He was born in 1703, three years before Benjamin Franklin, but Edwards died in 1758 when the enlightenment, you might say, was really beginning. Franklin lived more than 30 years beyond
Edwards, and Jefferson more than 60 years beyond the time of Jonathan Edwards, and therefore, I suppose, historically, Edwards is a contemporary of Franklin, although Franklin outlived him, but the point is that Edwards' essays, such as his essays on original sin, freedom of the will, the nature of true virtue, and one very important essay that I would call your attention to a little later again, the insufficiency of reason as a substitute for revelation. That is a direct
attack on the deists and represents, I think, some of the most skillful arguing involved in the whole controversy of natural religion versus revealed religion. Certainly, all of these essays by Edwards on freedom of the will, true virtue, the insufficiency of reason as a substitute for revelation are at odds with, but at the same time, they are brilliant attacks on many of the main concepts of the Enlightenment, and I think they can be used to clarify the
ideas of the Enlightenment by an interesting contrast. If you look at some of the works produced by the Enlightenment thinkers, Ethan Allen in 1784 was published his work, Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, which is obviously a very good example of an Enlightenment outlook or a statement of deism, or Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, the first part, at least, was published in 1794. These formulations, I would argue, are not at all elaborate. The deists did
not engage in elaborate, sophisticated, or subtle argumentation to present their natural religion, but Jonathan Edwards' arguments against deism, or natural religion, and his arguments against freedom of the will, his arguments against the innate goodness and perfectibility of human nature, since Edwards did not think that man could perfect himself, are very acute criticisms of what the Enlightenment stood for and provide clear background for understanding the main thrust of the environment, of the Enlightenment. If we look at
deism versus Calvinism for a minute, because certainly Edwards was the most articulate exponent of Calvinism that we had in early America, it is well known that freedom of religion, freedom from superstition, and freedom from oppression were central to Jefferson and Enlightenment thought. These were main considerations for Jefferson and other Enlightenment figures. Freedom of religion, freedom from superstition, and freedom from oppression. But freedom for the Enlightenment individuals was of a practical interest. They were not concerned about
freedom in terms of the theory of it, but having and protecting it. In contrast to Edwards, who composed a long and subtle dissertation on the free will question, Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers took free will as a matter of common sense or as almost self-evident. Consequently, Jefferson's writings on freedom are not concerned with examining its nature or asking whether it exists at all or how determinism or predestination can be refuted, but rather Jefferson's writings on
freedom are concerned with its effects, its utility, and its proper uses. For Edwards, free will is inconsistent with God's foreknowledge. It's inconsistent with a universal causality. Even God's will is determined, according to Jonathan Edwards, and not free as the indeterminists would have it or the Arminians. For Edwards, man is not free to choose. His choices are always determined by his strongest motive, whatever that strongest motive is, along with the last dictate of the understanding. But paradoxically,
for Edwards, man is free to do what he chooses. Although he's not free to choose to begin with, he is free to do what he chooses. This distinction between being free to do what you choose but not free to choose is considered pure nonsense by Jefferson and other Enlightenment figures. They put this not to a dialectical test of logical analysis, but simply take the position that it's a specious distinction, a distinction that only abstract ideas formulates,
and there is no concrete meaning or sense to such a distinction. It has no practical importance. The same point applies to Jefferson's deism and that of Thomas Paine, Nathan Allen, and Franklin. It is not elaborately argued or explained or defended. Calvinism is not elaborately criticized by Jefferson. Rather, it's brushed aside as not good sense, as something that sours the disposition, as something that is based on whimsy or superstition. Anticipating the American pragmatist, William James, Jefferson rejects
Calvinism as not true because it does not work, because it does not promote the interests of humanity. He applies a pragmatic test to Calvinism, and it fails the test. Needless to say, Edwards would have considered this pragmatic test of Calvinism irrelevant because for Edwards, the whole point of religion is not for the benefit of man, but for the glory of the divine being, and therefore any humanistic test of religion for Edwards would be irrelevant. Jefferson and
others, members of the Enlightenment, believed in the natural rights of man and that man possesses an innate moral sense. Therefore, for Jefferson and Franklin and others, men possessed a common reason which, when properly used, enabled them to agree and cooperate with one another on matters all the way from the past. Naturally, men would also disagree, come to different conclusions because of their different experiences. But diversity and difference of opinion were respected and to be tolerated, according
to Jefferson, truth is not to be imposed on men, it is to be discovered and shared by them. No idea was clearer to Jefferson than the need for the separation of church and state. Even the atheist had natural rights, according to Jefferson, and any state based on reason would have to protect the atheist's rights as well as the rights of the believers. And therefore, a strong element of Enlightenment thought is the belief that the right to
a religion that dissension, difference of opinion must be tolerated, contrary ideas must be respected. In this connection, I would just read you a brief quote from a recent book by Henry Steele Comminger on this very topic. I would recommend it to you. He's a very good writer and I found it very interesting, Jefferson, Nationalism and the American Enlightenment. This is a quote from Jefferson that Comminger, maybe you're already familiar with it, but it bears on the
point I was trying to make. Jefferson says, if there be any among us who would wish to destroy this union or to change its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion can be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. Comminger adds a few comments after that and contrasts that with the surveillance, wiretapping, security checks, censorship and other things that occurred in the recent past. Edwards had
argued in his essay on the insufficiency of reason as a substitute for revelation, that man's reason is limited and defective. It cannot even prove that honey is sweet or that ice is cold. Man needs experience to prove those things. In the same way, man needs a religious experience to really know anything divine, to know God. Man's reason cannot present the living infinite power of the divine being to depraved man. In fact, Edwards argues that reason in
fact poses obstacles, paradoxes to man's intellect whenever he thinks on such ideas as infinity, omniscience, eternity and so on. And therefore any religion based on reason as the principle oracle or method has to be defective for Edwards. Jefferson was essentially unconcerned with the infinite, the eternal and things of a metaphysical sort. These were not particularly relevant to man's immediate pressing needs for security, happiness or good government. And therefore one finds little if any speculations by Jefferson
on topics concerned with the infinite and eternal and or the metaphysical. Like Franklin, Jefferson was pragmatic, even materialistic rather than idealistic. And he was not anti-religious or anti-philosophical as some people have thought, but he was, one can use a rather cumbersome expression, anti-unpractical. He was anti-visionary. And therefore one finds some very interesting attacks by Jefferson on Plato's philosophy, considered Plato's philosophy very bad for man because it leads man astray into Platonic forms
or ideas which carry him away from the pressing and real needs of this society and this world. A humanist, when it comes to religion, Jefferson repudiated Calvinism as inhuman. However, he did not overestimate man or exaggerate man's powers or override or forget man's flaws in the manner of Emerson or the American transcendentalists. Jefferson was not a pantheist, did not believe that God is really everywhere. He was a deist. And I don't think we can say that
he deified man, but he strove to humanize the deity and as much of nature and human nature as possible. Well, that is all I have to say now. What do you have to say? Don't stop. What? Okay, don't stop there. Ask him a question that we didn't want to ask. Go ahead. What was the name of your book again? It's called Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment. This is published. George Braziller, B-R-A-Z-I-L
-L-E-R. 1975, it's a new book. Henry Steele, Commager. He's a very good writer. One of the particularly troubling problems for some American historians in the 18th century now is to determine in what degree and in what ways some of these ideas of the obviously elite, Franklin Jefferson, like how it was filtered down to the average populace. There was hundreds and thousands of questions on the degree to which the Enlightenment ideas had actually affected the
animal street kindness. Yeah, that's a good question, but that's more or less a historian's question, and I wouldn't want to speak with any authority on that as a philosopher. I have read some historians and what they have to say about that. On the one hand, I have come across writers who have said that the average American at that time was more enlightened than we might give him credit for. The literacy of Americans, I don't know what
the percentage was, but during this time was fairly high. And since the philosophers themselves, we call them philosophers, were not philosophizing in the old school manner of writing subtle, long argumentations and so on. You might say that the ideas of Franklin could be shared by many literate ordinary people, because I think in a certain sense, Franklin himself was an ordinary person, except he had a lot of talents. Well, ordinary people can have talents and still be
ordinary people. So on the one hand, I think without, you know, a lot of documented evidence, I can imagine that these ideas could have seeped down, because I think there is some evidence that Tom Paine's Common Sense and his works were read and I think clearly understood by a lot of people. But I wouldn't really venture to speak with any authority in terms of how deep the influence went or how many people really were deists during
that time or something of that sort. Certainly Franklin, if you read what he has to say, or Jefferson, they were deists and they supported the main ideas of the Enlightenment. But how far that seeped down, I would really, I have to leave that question to the historians, I haven't really researched it. It's a good question, though. I've always understood that the checks and balances in this country grew out of a Calvinist suspicion of too much power
in the hands of any one person or any one group of persons. How, in fact, did we get that system when the people who grew it up were deists who believed in the innate perfectibility of human nature? The deists believed in the perfectibility? Did you say that? Sure, in the perfectibility, but that doesn't mean that A doesn't have to check on B. The perfectibility doesn't mean the perfection. Nobody is perfect and government, according to Jefferson, it's
healthy if you look upon any constitution or any government as an experiment. And therefore, it's going to have to be checked on. One of Jefferson's most firm beliefs was the idea that the government and the land belongs to the living and that the past generations cannot simply bind over their ideas and beliefs on the present generation so that the living body of law and whatnot has to be rethought and reworked by the individuals who are responsible
for it. Now, again, the question of the checks and balances, if you're asking this as a logical question, I could venture to answer, but if it's a historical question in terms of who is responsible for that, I would, again, give that over to the historians because I think Madison had a lot to do with the checks and balances and in terms of a system of government. But you're asking the question, if the people in the Enlightenment
believed that man was perfectible, why would they ever favor a system of government that had checks and balances in it? Yeah, but he was not predictably perfectible. He could also, he also was capable of evil. All right, he was capable of evil. He had potential for perfectibility. There was no predestined pattern that man was going to become perfectible. See, there's where the Enlightenment comes in. See, man will, man is bad principally because of his environment. I
mean, people like Benjamin Rush argued, you know, that if you could improve people's teeth and things of that sort, you could improve their morals. That is, there's a direct relationship between the material and social environment within which people live and the moral beliefs and patterns of behavior that they engage in. And therefore, Jefferson certainly believed that man could be corrupted, but only if he remained uneducated and didn't become enlightened. You couldn't really have the kind of
democracy Jefferson wanted to have with an uneducated public. You couldn't run it with just a few elite individuals having an education and the rest of the people uneducated. Enlightenment for Jefferson was to be spread as widely as possible in order that all the people could participate in the affairs of government. But maybe that doesn't really get at your question. Were you equating the term educated with the term intelligent? Well, education would be, proper education would be
a necessary condition to achieve any kind of enlightenment. Just because somebody has gone four years to a certain school for Jefferson wouldn't mean that he is enlightened. And Jefferson was very interested in, well, what programs of study do you have in those schools? Do you really have studies that will open up the mind and so on? Because for Jefferson, the worst thing that could happen to man is to have his mind chained to other people's ideas
or to ideas that the individual simply cannot free himself from or understand. What I was trying to drive at was that intellectually sharp politicians when he becomes corrupt is more dangerous. Yeah, all right. Well, Jefferson would say what we need in terms of leaders are not simply people with high IQs, but people who are enlightened. That means people who have had a chance to examine the nature of values and so on and to use their reason
to make valued distinctions. That's another point in Commager's book. He makes a big point in the very introduction he asks, how did we ever get from Independence Hall to Watergate? And he asks, is it not unique that at the time this country had to form its government, it was fortunate in having men like Franklin and Jefferson and all of these individuals who were intellectual leaders as well as humanitarian individuals who thought of the needs of others
and not simply... Well, I mean, that is very interesting that these people were not... Jefferson was certainly not led into government out of fame or fortune. He believed in what he was doing in terms of a humanitarian service. The same thing I think you have to say of Franklin and Tom Paine and these individuals because they did incur, they had to make sacrifices and they did incur much criticism and ran into much trouble. And it is
interesting, as you said, that they were humanitarian. Yeah. Do you consider Jefferson a philosopher? Oh, yeah. In what way then philosophically would he establish the self-evident truths and the inalienable rights that are expressed, say, in the Declaration of Independence? Well... How do you philosophically establish the truth of those? See... See, in saying that they're self-evident means that the average or ordinary person who has attained the age of reason can understand what these things are
and why they are absolutely needed by man. The proof of these things is not something separate from you and me, but something that you and I should be able to go over in our own mind by using our own reason and seeing, well, what would happen to us if we didn't have any freedom of thought? What would happen to us if we didn't have any freedom of speech and so on? For Jefferson, you don't need elaborate
arguments from someone else to demonstrate these things. They are self-evident in the sense that the ordinary reason of the ordinary person should be able to see that these things are necessary for any kind of meaningful existence. And that's why Jefferson doesn't offer elaborate argumentations. He offers some argumentation, but it's not very elaborate. He considers, for example, such questions as, well, some have claimed that the question of man's moral values are based upon the divine being.
And he says, well, that must obviously be false because that would mean then that the atheist can't be honest if morality depends upon belief in a divine being, then we couldn't have a moral atheist. Well, that's the kind of test Jefferson would apply, and that's the kind of philosophy he would do. If you want to call it short syllogisms, not very extended argumentation, but he does use forms of reasoning that we would call logical arguments. And
I call him a philosopher because he attended to the basic things in life. He attempted to apply reason and thought to such things as, what is the nature of man? What kind of society should man be living in? Instead of just applying these questions to people in Virginia, you see, or just apply these questions to his own family, he applied them to humanity and asked himself these basic questions. What is the nature of man? What is
the basis of morality? How does religion fit into government? These questions, which relate one important area to another, would be exactly what I would mean by philosophy. See, philosophy is not just concerned with science. It's not just concerned with government. It's concerned with relations between these things. How should science and government be related to one another? How should religion and morality be related? See, these are questions where we don't have any experts to give us answers,
and there's where philosophy comes in. And Jefferson would say, that's where we're all philosophers because we all have to make sense of these questions. How am I gonna relate my morality to my religion? How am I gonna relate my morality to my belief in government, you see? Whenever you get questions of that kind, you can't take them to a chemist, you can't take them to a historian, you can't take them to an archeologist. Everyone has to
become a philosopher to answer those questions. Because they relate one area to another, they're not in any one discipline. Maybe that doesn't get at the question you had. Well, I'm thinking in terms of why he comes up with life, liberty, why? Well, he didn't invent these things, and maybe I should have pointed out that the Enlightenment thinkers, if you look at the writings of Franklin and Jefferson and Payne and these people, very few of their ideas,
if any, are original. But what they find are better applications, perhaps, for some very old ideas than were found before. I mean, Jefferson did not invent the idea of natural rights. Matter of fact, it would be hard to find an idea that Jefferson invented. Perhaps his ingenuity shows up in terms of the way in which he put a number of these older beliefs together. Certainly, the American Enlightenment took from the European Enlightenment, which preceded it. Jefferson
was well-read in Locke. He was well-read in the ancient philosophers. He had studied the Epicureans and Plato and Aristotle and so on, and he used things from the Bible, from Plato and so on that made sense to his reason. But I wouldn't say that Jefferson was really an original philosopher or original thinker in the way in which certain figures in philosophy have come up with ideas that have been original in the sense in which
Jefferson's were not. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness wouldn't be self-evident if Jefferson had to invent them. I mean, they are ideas that everyone is supposed to recognize as important, and you really couldn't prove to somebody why he should consider his life important to him or why he should consider happiness important to him. If he begins to think about it at all, he would have to come to that conclusion if he's a person of
reason. Yes? Yes? Well, the Great Awakening was earlier, right? Are you talking about the Great Awakening in what, is it the 1730s or? Jonathan Edwards was part of the Great Enlightenment, but I mean, the Great Awakening, this, I view as a matter of religious revivals and not as a matter of, see, the Enlightenment is rather secular in terms of its thrust. It's concerned with religion, but it's more concerned with protecting people's rights to believe what they
wanna believe rather than in finding the one true religion. You see? It means it's the opposite of the other things that were. Well, if I understand the Great Awakening, it was based upon the belief, or certainly Edwards had the idea that true religion had to be emotive. You couldn't be religious if you didn't have the right emotions. Now, the Enlightenment figures were not concerned with emotional stirrings or any kind of emotional awakening. They were concerned with
using reason to persuade men to cooperate and to form better governments and things of that sort. They were concerned with practical problems. They weren't concerned really with saving individual souls, if you wanna put it that way. That was not their thrust. So it's actually some opposition to the Enlightenment. Well, certainly in contrast. Contrast. Contrast, too. See, when Edwards was writing his Calvinism, Calvinism was out of tune with his own times. Edwards was writing brilliant treatises on
original sin, the nature of true virtue, and by that time already, the Enlightenment had set in and Calvinism had lost its hold. There were internal disagreements about church government, church affairs, and there were disagreements with respect to theology that broke up the hold that Calvinism had over here. And therefore, by the time you get to certainly the 1750s, and Edwards was not an old man when he died. He would think he was in his early 50s.
He was writing brilliant defenses of Calvinism, but Calvinism had already lost its hold. Okay. What Jefferson was saying, then, is that perfectibility is tied in not only with something inherent in the nature of man, but with social and political systems as well that these are necessary. Yeah, because you can't just deal with man in terms of his nature to be practical about it. Man's nature is something that inhabits an environment, and that is material, and that
is social. And therefore, to solve man's problems, you have to improve the agricultural systems you have. Jefferson thought that agriculture was a very philosophical thing. You had to think about better ways of farming and improving your techniques of farming, not simply as an end in itself, but as a humanitarian end. And the more you thought about it in those terms, the more philosophical the study of the weather, the study of soil would become, and all of
these environmental problems, and certainly government, because today we sort of think, well, political philosophy, yes, that's a real philosophy, but who would ever talk about agricultural philosophy? And Jefferson would say, that's just as important as any other kind. If it is useful knowledge, then it benefits man and must find its proper place. Marxists have been very interested in industrial philosophy, agricultural philosophy. Marxism, did you say? At least in Soviet Union, a lot of gravitation in the
factories. What were the real forces that promoted it? What were the forces that promoted it? Well, one of the forces, I think, was the personality and energy and talent of the great figures that it had behind it. There is a lot of talent there, if you take these people together, Franklin and Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, they were unusual men because they had so many different talents. That, I think, is one of the primary factors. I would
recommend for a more detailed answer to this question, Comminger goes into this and asks the question, why is it that if the European Enlightenment preceded the American, how come the American Enlightenment was more successful over here? They had Enlightenment over there, but it didn't have the effect in France that it had here in terms of producing a stable form of democracy. And he tries to answer this in terms of the difference in terms of the circumstances
under which the Enlightenment rose over here. It didn't have to combat an established church, for one thing, and it didn't have to combat an established aristocracy. In other words, it had certain advantages that it didn't have to overcome. And it had the advantage of talented individuals who were there, it seems, at the right time. Because Comminger makes an interesting remark. He says, if Aaron Burr had been elected president rather than Jefferson, he thinks things would have
been conspicuously different, maybe not all that different, but conspicuously different. He thinks we were lucky that Jefferson was the one chosen president, what was it, in 1800. Wasn't he a grandson of Jonathan Edwards or on his mother's side? Aaron Burr? Yeah. And he was one of the best students, I understand, that old Nassau ever had, one of the most brilliant students. I think his grandmother was, or a grand, on his mother's side. Jonathan Edwards, he went.
In what way would it have been different? In what way? Would it have been different? Well, I think there's an interesting, Comminger mentions an interesting continuity if you go from Jefferson to Madison and Monroe. Maybe one of the things that would have been different, because if Aaron Burr had become president, maybe the people who followed Jefferson into the presidency wouldn't have followed. I don't know, but if that had happened, if you had gotten someone who was
not nearly as good as Madison, someone not nearly as good as Monroe, because after all, didn't they all serve two terms? You take eight years for Jefferson, eight years for Madison, and eight years for Monroe. That's quite a bit of a period of time. And those people shared these enlightenment ideas. And I think that is important in terms of the practical effect of the enlightenment, because if you have individuals who don't share those ideas, who would
be pushing for other things, or who would allow other individuals to push and influence them, we could have had other things happening. But again, I think that's more a question for the historian to answer. Yeah, any other questions or comments? This month, it's good to know that Edgars Hall falls through the field of humanitarian forces that Edgars used prior to the eternal war. They had all the soldiers involved. Oh, yeah. And then they needed the girls.
Edwards, yeah. Oh, Edwards Hall. Oh, Edwards has taken the girls through it? It was the first girl. Well, Edwards, in terms of the way he lived his life, was very humanitarian, but in his philosophy, he had this need to continually tear down man in order to build up God. Now, he was very humanitarian. He went off and tried to educate the Indians and so on, and he was a very humble individual. But in his theological writings,
over and over again, you have the repeated attacks to demonstrate that man is depraved and just hovering over the pit. This week in American Philosophy, I have my students reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I think it is a brilliant sermon. Hope my students respond to it the right way. But certainly, you'd have to say that in terms of the way he lived his life, he was a humanitarian, but the way in which
he presented his Calvinism, it's not a very humanitarian theory or set of ideas. Could I attempt to defend Edwards on that? It seems to me that what he was doing there was something of a Marine Corps philosophy where they say you've got to tear the recruits down to the lowest level before you can build them up. I get that sense as to what the Calvinism about is really about saying man's depraved and man's hopeless and awful
and more than a worm and to be crushed and on and on. It's not some sort of a sadistic business, but really, I think his assessment that that was the only way in which he could really glorify both God and man. He certainly believed that, but the question is, if man is so depraved, then he's not good enough to realize how bad he is, and that raises a serious question. That's why he does it, perhaps. That's
why he keeps emphasizing it because he's counteracting it. Could you explain that when you said earlier that Edward's thinking that man is not free to choose because his motives, whatever they happen to be, decide his choices, but he is free to choose what he will do. To do what he chooses. Or to do what he chooses. There's where he's free. See, for Edwards, On that event. Edwards does not deny that man makes choices. I choose to
go out of this building. I choose to come in this building. To choose is to will. That's what he means by will. To choose. Now the question is, if every effect that occurs in the universe has a cause, and Edwards believed that it did, even though man doesn't know, necessarily, what all the causes of all the effects are, then if I choose something, there must be something that causes my choice. If I choose to murder somebody,
then something must have caused me to make that choice. I couldn't have made it out of the blue with no cause at all. Now according to Edwards, the thing that makes us make a choice is our strongest motive. I always choose that which follows my strongest motive. Now that doesn't mean that it will always turn out for the best. I mean, if I have a strong desire for something, and that desire is stronger than any other
desires I have, then that will determine the choice I make. But you're saying Edwards is always defending communism. Right. With just predestination.