Transcript

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In organizing some of my files, I have found an old pencil-remark which I may read to you, to introduce this problem of today. And the problem is, of course, the place of Jonathan Edwards between the 17th century and the 19th century. I don't know in which connection I jotted down this note, but it speaks for itself.

"Injecting themselves in a dangerous moment of moral collapse, between the Pilgrim Fathers and the American-born, between pioneers and New England -- now already old -- between civilians, engineers of the 19th century, and the soldiers of the two world wars, Edwards, Emerson, James -- that is, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James -- have rebuilt the American way of life three times. A faint-hearted generation was encouraged to remain all-inclusive; stay open to life's real width, length and height."

Now, I offer you this as a motto to what I shall try to do today for Jonathan Edwards. I said to you that he introduces the scientific bent, which we know so well as dominating William James' scientific psychology and rational philosophy of his first age's pragmatism, that he represents this for the first time, but in a strange fashion, in a negative philosophy of will, of the will. Jonathan Edwards is -- became famous in the 18th century in Europe. And he's the first American to be respected in Europe as a thinker. That's why he is so important. You can imagine that by 1750, before Ja- -- Benjamin Franklin, there just was nobody in the New World whose thoughts seemed considerable and weightful within the old structure of Europe, within the universities, for example. But Jonathan Edwards was famous in Edinburgh, where people, as you know, have very good brains. His book was printed there, also his historical book, The Economy of Salvation, and this gives you an idea of his esteem, within the Old World. He spoke a language they might not approve of, but they had to accept as being equal in forcefulness, and in training, and in discipline to their own way of thought and discipline.

If you ask now, "How come -- what -- what was in content so important and so contemporary that they said this man has to be mentioned, and has to be reasoned with, and has to be counted with in Europe?" -- when you ask this question, you can see that he puts the question of the scientific mind, of the scientific reason squarely into the center of his work, at his desk. In writing books, he did not just have his church in mind, and his congregation -- as the Pilgrim Fathers, who wanted to nourish the flame inside the congregation -- but he started in two directions from his little church. If you take here the little village church in Northampton, and later in the wilderness of Stockbridge -- among

the Stockbridge Indians, where he had a very desolate existence -- he did two things which together enabled the trustees of Princeton to call him in as their president. This -- not one of the two biographers here unfortunately stressed sufficiently that it was, after all, strange that a revivalist, and a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians could be called to become president of Princeton in 1758. He died within six weeks after he had been called there, from the flu, but -- pneumonia -- and he was very surprised, because he had expected that this call would be the coronation of his life's work. His greatest book, this universal history from the aspect of divine providence was published after his death. So you shouldn't have omitted this from your papers. Only the fact that Princeton called him equals in America the respect he was held -- by -- in -- in Edinburgh, obviously. That, so to speak, matches the European respect given him.

And in the Princeton call, I think two things become rallied, and reconciled, and united -- unified, you may say, of his life's work: the revival inside the Church, and the polemics against the secular brain -- of science, going wild on its own. Both together make him the outstanding person. If you do not see this very careful balance -- you have here this nave of the Church. And here the people gather and form the cross, the body of Christ. That's the idea, as you know, of the Church, forgotten to you, that when people come there on Sundays, they form the living Cross -- crucial situation of Christ's own and living body. Not the building, and there is not an altar, and there are no pews, and there are no benches meaningful, but in the 18th century, the Congregationalists of Massachusetts still knew that the congregation is the Church; and that you have to have a building around it is very accidental, and rather superfluous. And certainly it shouldn't be -- today they should all be torn down, the churches, so that we can see if there is any church or not. If there is no church without the buildings, you see, then the buildings aren't worth supporting.

You cannot understand the situation of Jonathan Edwards if you do not see that there had dwindled down this power of forming every Sunday out of the political community, of a meeting house, and a congr- -- a community living around this meeting house, if you have -- forgot that there had to be the power on Sunday to transform this secular group of divided people -- divided in their work interest, family life, and age, and sex -- into one union, the transcending power of the so-called meeting house in the 18th century was that it saw the metamorphosis, the famous transubstantiation not only of bread and wine in the Communion, but that these same people who were just flesh and blood -- that is, bread and wine -- on weekdays now became the body of Christ, the divine and the inspired unity on Sundays. That's why the Protestant churches are not open on weekdays, why they are closed except for the Sunday hour, because if you want to pray, you pray privately, secretly, in your own bedchamber. That's understood since the -- since the Gospel was written, that your own prayer,

which you can perform as a -- as an individual, doesn't belong into the Church. The public service, however, injects into your own attitude something you cannot get by your own willpower, and by your own subjective lyricism, and emotionalism, and pietism, and however these -- these sugar-coated elements of sentimentality might be labeled in a religious manner. But you have to expose yourself to the scurrility of the world, that you are willing there to take the attitude of needing the -- congregation for knowing what you have to do. That is, a common spirit of the congregation gives you a cer- -- certain understanding of your situation that nobody can ever get by his own willpower.

Now this, Jonathan Edwards tried to revive. This power, gentlemen, I'll put it once more -- to transform the secular pioneer and settler into a member of a living body of people who do not their own will, who, from their love of Christ, are willing to do God's bidding. This is the problem of the will in the Church: that my will and your will have to be dismissed. If you cannot get out of the church and come -- go home with the sudden enlightenment, the sudden clarity that all the wishes you carried into church -- so you want to ta- -- go to Europe, or you want to marry this girl, or you want to become rich -- that they are nothing compared to the true intention of the world's government by its creator, then don't go to church. Then it's a misunderstanding. You don't go there for good feelings.

Now, many people followed my advice, already in 1750 and said, "We don't know anything anymore about church life, and remain secular." There has been of course in this country always -- 90 percent of the people have been blasphemers, and swearers, and drunkards, and whores, and what-not, as in most countries in the world. I think the proportion here was a little larger, even. It has never mattered, as long as America still boasted of the Pilgrim Fathers. This thing is only serious now where everybody pokes fun at the -- Puritans, because you see, it doesn't matter in any country or in any time what the majority of the people thinks -- as long as the majority conforms to the minority. It's the opposite from what you think it should be. You must understand that in any class, in any college, there are only 10 outstanding students. As long as the 10 outstanding students are acclaimed by the other 675 as outstanding, everything is wonderful, because then the top is the top, and the tail is the tail. But here, in this college, you have reached already the point where a man has to hide and conceal his intellectual achievements or his intellectual interest. It's dangerous. There and then you get majority rule and that's mob rule, always. Gentlemen, there is never in any time of society the majority strong enough to stand on its own feet. That's -- doesn't exist. You have to be satisfied when in any one time there are two or three { } {prophet}. That's very many. The -- your idea that every one is one is just ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. The sooner you wake up to the old Gospel that this isn't so, the better it is. You have to be satisfied if there are 12 apostles in

the whole Roman Empire at one time.

But if you think -- do you think these people in Rome were any worse than we are today? They were just as normal people. The salt has to be a little part of the meat, but you have to have some salt, as you -- the Gospel says, to salt. But the salt is minority. It is not a minority that rules, but a minority which is recognized as being the -- the salt of the earth. As we say today, still, of a man. If you have 10 good men in one town, well, you can reform the whole town, can you not? As long as the others say these are good men. If the others say of these 10 good men, they are not good men, then it's terrible.

You know this man, who wrote this new book. Oh, he's quite famous from his Hiroshima book.

(Hersey.)

Hersey. Have you read -- seen his new book? Has anybody heard of it? He makes this attempt of showing the rejection of a community of the -- its best citizen. You remember?

(Yes. In Massachusetts.)

Ja. And that's the state of affairs, gentlemen, which is really always calling forth the -- the catastrophe. It is never the absence of the good man in -- as a majority, because never is a majority of us awake, or strong, or hearty enough. They always have to be called to order. But when the call to order is answered by an outcry, that the caller is below parity and not above parity, then the society can no longer be cured.

Jonathan Edwards therefore -- if you think of the -- of the same church in the 17th century, you -- and the little country that they covered -- you may put it in this simple way, that outside the church certainly there were people who never were reached by the preaching, but the people who filled the nave of the church -- able to admit their shortcomings -- outnumbered the secular people here, the people who believed in witchcraft and tried to bewitch their neighbors' cow, the people condemned in the Salem trials, of which people always forget that they were convinced of their own witchcraft, to a large extent, and meant to do harm, very much so. Now however in 7- -- this is 1650, or -- let's put 1660. If you take now the situation, in 1740, during the great revival. It is obvious, if you look just at the map, that the settlements had multiplied. These people had all 12 children -- well, seven of them had died, but five lived. And the immigration had been apace -- gone apace, and so you see there were innumerable people who didn't care -- sects, also; and you have in the Congregational Church then, all of

a sudden, the minority. That's by and large the situation.

Now, I do not put this on to show you what we have in 1840 or 1940, where we have one against a hundred, and here we have one against a thousand, inside and outside the Church. Now for Edwards, the {resolve} -- very different from -- as we shall see -- from Emerson, and from James -- was one: you have to speak to the people outside. You have to speak it to the people outside. And you have to divide the sheep and the goats. You have to speak to those who may still be moved into the interior of the Church by terms of a revival. And you have to talk to those people who will not budge in any case to enter the Church in terms of logic, of science, of philosophy. So you may say that he is -- here he is the preacher, you see. Here he is the philosopher. And here is the revivalist, that is, the converter. But let us just at this moment use the crude term "revivalists," because there was no such man -- no revivalist in the 17th century needed. Seasickness and for three months on a boat is enough to revive anyone's faith in almighty providence.

So gentlemen, we have this man, Jonathan Edwards, in three capacities. One: to the people whom he can still hope to get into the Church. And the other group to which he talks outside. I can't get you inside, but I can give you the negative side of your existence. I can here tell the congregation of saints what the Gospel tells. I can make these sinners into saints. And I can talk to the sinners. That's the terminology of Jonathan Edwards. We would say today, "I can speak to the fundamentalists in church. I can convert the agnostic. And I have to reason with the deliberate sinner." The del- -- we don't call these people "sinners." We call them today "smart," probably, or "intellectuals." These are the two typical words. I think "intelligentsia," you have to say today for their depriva- -- depravity. In the 18th century, they were called "sinners." That is, people who believe that withou- -- they -- by their own willpower, they can save themselves, which is today the normal approach to life.

When -- most of you would be sur- -- quite surprised if I tell you that by willpower you can't do anything. That is the -- however, the Gospel, that it is impossible for any man to save himself. You take any rationalist -- the more a rationalist he is, the more he depends on one good woman who will fulfill his desires. Certainly -- usually they need many women, these rationalists, who are good enough to sacrifice their lives and their devotion to their existence. It's -- has always -- puzzled me how all these anthropologists like Mr. Malinowski, or Mr. {Perito}, or -- or Karl Marx, or Lenin, how they completely depended on the devotion of women, and how this nowhere appears in their philosophy, in their program, in their politics, as dogma, that one-half of mankind must always be willing to sacrifice for the other half, which is so clever and so smart, that they declare that they do everything by their own will. Your sex you cannot -- the

appetites of your sex you can never satisfy yourself. And therefore this means that the more you are a rationalist, the more the woman who gives you love has to be sacrificed on the altar of your rationalism, because rationalism omits this very fact. It isn't even grateful for this love, because it says, "Well, it's so stupid. Beyond words." I don't understand how anybody can sacrifice his existence for love, but these women seem to do it. They seem to want it.

So the women in this way are always excluded from good Marxian or good liberal society, because it seems so nonsensical for the rationalist. The rationalist only follows his enlightened self-interest. Now certainly it is in no woman's enlightened self-interest to be affected by the man's whims, venereal diseases, debts, bankruptcy, and -- and dangers. He may be shot dead on the battlefield, then she's a widow after being a fortnight of being married. She does it, just the same, and she loves it, because she loves him.

So in womanhood, gentlemen, life begins with love for a person. In rationalism, life begins with love of an idea. A woman cannot love ideas, or she goes crazy. They do now in Smith, I -- I know, and -- but they are very poor women. When a woman loves an idea, then she becomes very dangerous. She usually becomes a Communist and throws bombs. When you cond- -- a woman at 45 may love ideas. A woman of 20 may not. If she does, something is blown out of her system: her heart. And her -- below the belt, she serves really then the Devil. The -- you find that Emerson, you find that William James, and you find that Henry James never mentioned their wives. They're taken for granted. Only these people were enlightened enough to include the life and the soul of their wives into their philosophy. But they were unable to give a place in life for the structure of womanhood, which is anti-idealistic. But out of William James' fight against mere idealism, speaks very much this consciousness, as with his brothers, as with his father, so especially with his mother and his wife, he was initia- -- initiated into the real powers that run this world. And they certainly are the opposite from mere reason.

So once more, gentlemen, the superiority of the religious thinker in all centuries has always been that he was able to do justice to the indispensability of the children's legendary existence, and of the wives' sacrificial existence, and that they always knew that these people were just as real human beings as the so-called scientist, and the so-called philosopher; and that they were the poorer, in your science and your philosophy, the more you made your own s- -- idiotic behavior of mere rationalism the norm of humanity.

But the great event -- breakdown of the self-confidence of the {freature}, which we find in Joanathan Edwards' tragic life--and it was a tragic life--he, after all -- no one, not one of you two biographers said this again, that he was exiled

into the wilderness, without a library, without white men, among the Indians. Have you no feelings, no sympathy with such a great tragedy, with such a majestic endurance by which he was put to the test? I can't understand you. The two main facts of his life are just this: at first he was sent -- thrown away, cast out into the -- into the woods and then he came back and was made Prince- -- president of Princeton. That's a dramatic life. It doesn't end in 1750. The drama of his life is between 1750 and 1758, or -6. When did he die? When did he die?

('58, I think.)

Well, "I think," Sir. You have to know, not to think.

('58).

It is '58. So he establishes the right of the secular, and he revives the power of the ecclesiastical realm. And therefore, he already represents the dualism between the first and the second generation of which we have spoken at such length, you see, in the 19th century. Can you see now the importance of Edwards? Because the fullness of the secular life was left behind in the 17th century, was left to the Old World, to Europe. In Jonathan Edwards it attained a mission in this country, but the form in which it was admitted is very typical. And I think you should admire the organic processes in which mental, spiritual, intellectual life is replanted, or is developed in such a new world as ours, here. The first aspect of the scientific, which gains a foothold in this country, is to view it from the church steeple, to look at it as the new danger, and to give it therefore a negative philosophy, so to speak, a negative status.

You may have heard that in the first thousand years of our Church life, there was a -- quite a group of people who treated of God in a way of a negative philosophy. They said, "We can know of God nothing except what He is not. We -- we know he is not fin- -- finite, so we call Him `infinite.' We know He is not limited, so we call Him `unlimited.'" And on and on, you see. "We know something, He knows everything. We are potent, He's omnipotent." These are, in fact, the people would say -- these are in fact negative qualifications. "Everything we may be able to think and excogitate about the world in which we live is categorized. We must free God from our categories, so He is more than any one of our categories." And finally the people went so far to say, "He's good and bad. He's limited and infinite. He's free and necessary," because they wanted to express the paradox that God must be more than any one aspect of a dualism, because if He was only on one side, couldn't be God. Then He would be a limited force of reality. Like night and day, God obviously must be night and day, which by the way is an old attempt of antiquity already to establish the gods of antiquity were just -- people felt this very deeply -- more powerful than any one of their seasons.

And if you look at a Mexican statue in the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, which I recommend highly to you, or the Natural History Museum in New York, you will find that the statues of the God always alternate between a grimace and a very severe face and a very angelic -- {part}. There are these {stylies}, which you may have seen, with three or four divine faces, which are in alternation horrid and meek, appealing and deterrent. Why is that so? Because God has to be beyond the division of appeal and repeal, of horror and attraction. And these people were very good theologians in antiquity. Don't think that these pious pagans had not very profound insights into what the divine was. Therefore Vitzliputzli and all the gods of the Mexicans had just these very same qualifications, that they were one god in the tempest and in the sunshine, in the winter and in the summer. And if you -- read these {stylies} with this understanding -- which is too much for a modern intellectual, because he's -- has watered down his thinking to logical, little arithmetic, that one thing cannot be the other -- then you would find that the first thought of antiquity on God was that God is one thing and the other. The divine logic begins where you say, "A equals B." And the modern logic begins with this very plat- -- great platitude -- platitude that this overcoat cannot be a chair, you see. But that's not interesting. We know this, you see. That's for children.

But God is in you and in me, and in all our ancestors, and all our future generations, although we contradict each other. Now, if you can rhyme this, then you begin to know why we have to speak of God, because otherwise, there could be not peace between you and me. I have to admit that the same spirit may move you and me, although we appear to each other as devils incarnate.

This is the story then of Jonathan Edwards' experience, that the secular mind of any one period has to be spoken to, even before he has recognized the paradox of being at peace with his opposite number, male especially with female. The so-called "natural mind," gentlemen, of 18th-century philosophy, of which you read and hear, and which you ha- -- should study in the department of philosophy here is ...

[Tape interruption]

...a condescension which the Christians, since the -- 1100 more and more had to make to cope with the unmarried, the unparadoxical mind of the plumber, of the technician who's only interested in things, and therefore doesn't know that life only begins when a couple can get married and say, "I am myself, and you are yourself, and yet we are one." That's where life -- real life of humanity begins. "You are different from myself, but yet we are whole -- one." The plumber says, "We remain different. That's all I know. The rest is mysticism," they say. But the same plumber is married, and the same plumber expects the fire depart-

ment to risk their lives when he is burning out in his workshop. So all these idiots which today dominate the scene, the plumbers, the physicists they -- we call them today, these glorified plumbers will only rationalize what -- on what they see, and they do not see all the strings that are attached to their very existence, by all the good people who protect them, who pay them their salaries, and who allow them to do all their glor- -- self-glorification about their science.

You live under this idolatry today, as you know, of a -- well, "secular" of course has today reached such limits, that I -- I had a hearty laugh at lunch today, because I read the announcement of a new acquisition of this library here, our beloved Baker Library. They bought an edition of Fortune with the title, "What People Will Buy."

[Tape interruption]

So this is an {official} religion of cheating. Officially it is declared desirable, and great, and heroic to make people buy that which they do not really need, because, as you say -- as I say, if you know -- buy what you need, for this you don't -- not have to have any agency. You must see the secular in all its bloom today to understand why, from the point of view of a leader of a community, it is so very second-rate. It is there. I don't begrudge any man the attempt of getting rich or of selling his wares. But his first demand obviously is: do the people need what I sell? You see. Let me do something which they actually need. If now these farmers of Vermont try to talk us into eating cream all the time, you see, and getting overweight, you have to laugh, you see. They'd better give up their dairies. You know that's the great crusade at this moment in -- in the dairy states, that we -- all of us, you see, have heard so much about dieting that we no longer drink enough whipped cream -- eat whipped cream. So what will people buy?

Now that is behind the -- or that is the outcome of secular -- of the secular mind, that your purpose has to be followed out to the maximum, because you want to sell. Therefore you write a gospel for America: how do I make the other people buy my product? This is secular, because it doesn't begin with the paradox that I and the man who does not want to buy, and never will buy what I produce, still form one society. This is the mystery. That is, people who do not serve my ends, my purposes, are just as much people -- brothers, sisters of mine -- as the people whom I can make subservient to my ends. This is mysterious. It is not proven by any secular rationalization. I mean -- no self interest can ever explain why the man who is interested in his own aims, and in his own self, has to feel that the people who do not serve his self-interest, like, for example, a good priest, or a good missionary, or a good preacher, or his wife, or his mother, why they are more intimately connected with him, and have more solidarity with him

than all the people whom he can jump -- make jump at his command and at his whim. I mean, you -- will admit that the salesman who makes 10,000 customers buy his stuff has no such relationship with the people he really depends upon for his attachments, for his emotional life. He will tell the people he really loves, "For Heaven's sake, don't buy this." That's a test of his real love, and of his real belonging, you see. When any man in his own field says, "You don't need this, really. You can get with- -- go without. Oh, I -- I'll give it to you, but don't buy it," then you know that this man has real connection with you, real contact, that he is really with you in one and the same human family. Can you see the difference?

This is the pre-secular existence out of which the secular in every generation comes again. The following of my purpose, of my specialty, of my jo- -- of my profession, is always based on the assumption that despite all our spreading into many directions, we are still living in and out of one root. Once you have to give up this hope, that regardless of my -- your buying or selling to me, you see, we are together, there is no America, there are no United States.

Will you kindly try to understand that what I am showing you here is: the birth of this, or the re-birth of America of a necessary conflict, of one-generation purpose, and all-generation faith, or solidarity. The solidarity of the human race defies to be dependent -- made dependent on any share of economic, financial, or { } {interest}. It's -- too shoddy and it's too changing. That's not good enough. You cannot love people who come to your market and buy in your tent. You leave them again. Next year you have another product and you go to another market. Why not? But that's second-rate. So the problem is to have and to live happily in two worlds. One of first-rate importance, and the other of second-rate importance. The secular mind says, "I cannot do this. I have to rate the secondrate world as first-rate."

Therefore the logical dichotomy of secular and ecclesiastical is very poor and very misleading. It isn't a dichotomy of one here, and the other there. It is one of perpetuity, and the other of transiency. The secular world depends on the commodities, for example, we produce. Obviously I have to make people sell coal, and later I have to make them sell electricity, and that will be different in every generation. And therefore I'll call myself with a different name for my agency. I'll use different mass media for getting onto the market. But what of it? That's all second-rate. And it's all perfectly okay. Nobody will object to the fact that we now have blacktop. But when a professor of history at Harvard begins his lecture on the history of the 19th century by saying that the blacktop on this first street in New York in 1874 makes an epoch in history, you have to laugh this man out of court. That's making second-rate changes, you see, into first-rate historical epochs. And that's all over the place today. And you all believe it. To

tell you the truth, you are all against me, and you are all on the side of the Harvard professor, Mr. Schlesinger, Jr., who embodies this stultification of the human mind in this country.

The whole Eisenhower administration is in -- up in arms against this, of course. All the elements of a greater continuity of America are up in arms against this -- this gang of intellectuals gathered around the New York Times, because they have no ways of placing their intellect into two different concepts. One of my own self-interest and its purposes, which is perfectly -- you always have to say, "All right." Mr. Schlesinger wanted to become professor at Harvard. He has achieved it. That's all right. But that there is Harvard, that there are the United States -- that depends on soldiers, on missionaries, on nuns, on nurses, on all kind of people who do unrecognized service. There is no community of a first rate, gentlemen, that does not live by unrecognized service. The soldier who, on watch, although he could go to sleep, doesn't go to sleep, doesn't get a premium. Nobody sees what he's doing. He could get away with a half-an-hour nap. It is only he who represents the United States at -- in this moment. There is no policeman, no cop who can see and inspect him, because if you put a watch over a watch, and a watch over the watch who wetch- -- watches the watch, where do you get? There is an ultimate where there is no control, where you just have to do your duty, although nobody else will ever know that you have done it.

Then you wake up to the fact that there is nobody else except you to cement the order of the universe. There's absolutely nobody else. There is no law. There is no regulation. There is no cop. And so there is no mother and no father, my dear child, to sweeten your -- your worries, because you still have their eyes set on you. No. You are your own god, completely your own. And then you feel, of course, you aren't your own, because it may cost your life, because it may cost your life to stand on watch in the -- such a dark night, with the enemy attacking. So you know very well that nobody can do his duty as an unrecognized servant if he doesn't believe in his representing some bigger order than himself. And no soldier therefore is without religion. It's only the civilian mind that can laugh this off and say, "I can do without it." He doesn't know how much he depends on others who have that which he has not, and for the lack of which he can only be despised or -- or put in second place. But we have reached the point today where the snickerer and the sneerer is put in the first place. He's clever; he's smart. And the people admire him.

With Jonathan Edwards -- where's the book? Did anybody -- one -- did you bring it, or I had promised to bring it, did I? On the Freedom of The Will, we also enter an interesting controversy. Before you -- giving you the controversy, however, I shall give you a -- the lift of five minutes of --.

[Tape interruption]

...of his book on the will, Jonathan Edwards puts the question whether human will is free. His last biographer has mistaken his question and has isolated it. And {Barry Miller} thinks he is a real predecessor of the people who discuss the freedom of the will in the 19th century in philosophical terms. But you will now understand that for Jonathan Edwards, the freedom of the will is always only the corollary to the love of God. Will and love are both there in his vocabulary any minute. And when he discusses the will of man, he can do so because he knows, and he thinks he can assume that his readers still know what the love of God is. In the 19th century, that was completely given up. One-half carried the whole day. And if you today discuss will in your departments of philosophy, it goes so far that love is made a subdivision of will, instead of being the opposite.

I always say that if you identify love and will, it is exactly the same as when you identify -- atomic bomb with a newborn baby. Love is like the newborn baby, and will is like the atomic bomb. And they have very little in common. Especially the -- they are divided by the fact that one is alive, and the other is mechanic. And your will is the mechanical part of you. It's the self in you that -- the mortal self that has force, energy, that can all be quantitatively, so to speak, stated in forms of wid- -- width, length, and height. The baby, however, cannot, because it can only be stated in terms of future, growth, affection, and being expected, and being promised. So in very different terms, indeed.

This is then the point in the American history, the year 1750, which today has to be reconquered. As long as you identify will and love, you must end with Mr. McCarthy, because fascism and Communism are the only forces in which logically such a system is complete. Where will and love are identified -- or as it is even worse today, where love is simply one whim of will, where you will to love, where you want a girl and therefore say "I love you," but not meaning it, because you only will her -- in such a society, the only will that can tame all these wills is, of course, external, a dictator, a -- a secret police, the army, a commander-inchief. It is only where you admit that inside yourself that you are torn between will and love, that we can admit and we can believe that man is in this sense subject to influences which tame his shelf -- self and bring his self under control.

I put it in a German essay on "What is Man?" the other day in a very simple way. The man who says, "Man consists of will, feeling and intelligence" is called today in this country "a thinker." He's -- denies two -- three things: that man is a member, that man is unique, and that man is personal. In this definition of will, knowledge, and emotion, as you see -- the membership, the powers by which we are members of larger units, just doesn't occur, because if you will to

be a member, you aren't a member. You must be a member, and then inside the membership have a will to fulfill your membership. But membership is something that cannot be given to you. You are the son of a family, Sir, you can't will to be a son of a family. Just there. And then you will accordingly, that's membership. That you are a person makes that people listen to you. Now all the intellectuals want to sell their books. That is, in other words, they want to find a way of persuading people to listen to them. They want authority. Authority -- that is personality, you see -- is not within the realm of describing a person as having knowledge, emotions, and will, because not any one of these -- qualities qualifies you to be listened to, or to have any authority over anybody else.

So this so-called "theme" of secular philosophy in the last 300 years, gentlemen, you must understand was always meant as a rival to religion. It was an attempt to describe that individual which is not a member of a church, which is not married by love to a larger unity, which is not taught and inspired. It is a rump. It is the mutilated self. When you say, "I stay outside these three given great roots, great belongings, or -- that existed in 1620 when the people landed here," that is, that they were members of God's commonwealth, that they were inspired, because they had been taught, and that they were unique, so that they had the authority of a experience which nobody else had, and they became persons -- these three things were always presumed. And in Will- -- in Jonathan Edwards, you have still this heroic situation, that he still holds onto the belief shared by his contemporaries, that this was so, and tries to put at rest the weak part in us, when we lose our membership, forget our inspiration, and are cowards and have no mission to fulfill in life. In all these weak moments of ours, we are philosophers, that the philosopher always takes the gap in our armor and tries to console us in these dark, black nights of failure, of absence of spirit, of absence of love, and of absence of membership. And for these individual situations in which most of you find yourself at this moment in college, philosophy is quite a good thing, because it fills a gap of our normal attachments, of our normal inspiration, of our normal loyalties. When there are no such loyalties, we try to explain our existence just the same.

This is the meaning then, of the discussion of the freedom of the will in Jonathan Edwards' book, that he deals with that part of us which remains unredeemed, uncheerful, pessimistic, doubtful, and says, "To you I can only say that at the moment in which you think is these terms, you are just pure force, brute force." He wouldn't have said at that time I think "brute animal." Perhaps he wouldn't also have said "brute force." But he s- -- said, "You will be unfree. You will not be free."

Don't overrate therefore your pessimism. Don't overrate your causation theories. Don't -- your epistemology, your ethics. Everything philosophy can do,

you see. You must see that these are just like the bubbles of your bad digestion, as -- a modern psychoanalyst would also say. And in -- if you analyze Jonathan Edwards' theory of the -- of the servitude of the will, it is very much like Freud, because all interpretation of the sinful ego amounts to the same thing, to show that it is projection of desires, of urges, of instincts, that man's big ideas about himself are all rationalizations of his desires, and -- and you could take Edwards and translate him into Freud, and not doing violence to either one of the two, because it is the sinner of Edwards, which in all its -- his bleakness, and his despair, and his blackness, and his being fettered to his repressions, and his pains, and his desires, which is given in Freud's analysis.

Therefore, gentlemen, I always wonder about you. When I say, "Man is not free," your scientific ego says, "Wonderful. Of course he isn't. We are just part of nature." And when I say, "Man is free," you also, as a liberal -- liberal, rejoice and say, "Of course, against these damn Puritans and these religionists, man is free." You all -- any one undergraduate of this college is split in his tenets. You yourself, Sir, you -- believe in the morning that man's will is free and in the afternoon that he is not free. And you rejoice over both statements. And that is so very funny to me. I have never found in any Dartmouth student who has ever made -- up his mind to see that he cannot be a liberal without believing in the freedom of the will, and that he cannot be a naturalist without believing in the necessity of the will. What you really mean, I do not know. But you are all carrying on both shoulders. You are all split. Every one man in this college, on this campus, has available to himself two opposite beliefs. One comes, of course, from the membership in some religious body of your ancestors. And you won't give this up, that man can be good, for example. He can be -- be evil, he can be a genius, he can be creative, he can be a person. You all believe this. You are all reformers at your heart. But at the same time, you also think it is wonderful that every man underlies strict psychological laws, that by analysis it is proved that it's all in the glands, your whole life, and -- and that two and two is four, and that you can make people buy anything, because you can cheat them; and they are like apes, and like sheep, and they can be led by you. You believe it all, at once.

Now, in this anarchy, of course, a man like Jonathan Edwards is too logical. And William James, by the way, too. These people knew that it had to be either way. You were either one or the other. Now Jonathan Edwards' solution was that you are at times one and at time, the other. But he was very careful to state when you are one, and when the other. Unfortunately you are not. You are absolutely careless about this. You think you are -- can both be at random. You will in the same -- at the same cocktail party, or at the same bull session, uphold the both -- both -- opposite tenets. I have seen it. And you must admit that this is so. What?

(Would you give us the opposing view?)

Which opposing view?

(The one that says we are completely { }. Well, I -- I don't see what -- I -- I think that this is a perfectly natural conclusion to come to. I think that -- that man being {imminent} and transcendent comes to the conclusion that he is part {free} and not -- not free.)

Well, the important thing then is to know the conditions under which we are free and are not free. When we fear, we obviously are not free. When we are without fear, we are free, for example. However, in Emerson, you find of course the glorification of the freedom, you see, -- per se, because Emerson was so unafraid that he never thought man was such a coward and so fearful, just as much. He always thinks we can be free, because we don't fear. So there you have the --

(I thought you yourself were castigating this particular position, I mean.)

Pardon?

(I thought you were castigating the position there.)

No! But doesn't everybody -- one of you know that when we do not provide for membership, and for tradition, and for personal sacrifice, that we fall -- become slaves then of our fear, and our ambition, and our own will. Our will is just enslaving us. Any vice shows you this. The addict is a man whose will has become master of his freedom. Freedom is therefore -- something constantly lost and re-acquired. It's like virginity for a girl. It has to be re-acquired. Any woman, any ma- --- moment she loves is a virgin again and has to be reconquered. There is not such a difference between a virgin and a wife. Do you think our -- our -- your mother is not a virgin every morning again? She is, because she recuperates. She is put again into the right atmosphere of a family. You don't believe in any of these things, I know. But I don't see how -- how you then can call your mother "Mother." Then Freud is right, that she is always subject to your own lusts, and your own appetites. She isn't. You know this very well, that to you, she is your mother. That is, she is completely sexless. And you are also old enough to say -- know openly that this isn't so with regard to the man who loves her.

Any mother is virgin and bride at the same time. That's why the Catholic Church worships the virgin and the bride in one person. That's her secret. It isn't therefore the -- a -- a new problem, gentlemen. Since there has been religion in the world, the paradox has been for the gods to be there in rain and shine, and

for you and me to be free and slaves. That's a religious problem. It's an eternal problem. When you are first-rate, and when are you second-rate? You are firstrate when you are free, and you are second-rate when you are a -- the servant of your will. That's why the only prayer that is unanimous in Christianity to this day is the prayer to be emancipated from your own will. But nobody seems to -- to heed this prayer. I have seen people pray "Our Father in Heaven," and yet believe that will -- their will is free. The will isn't free. But from the love of God, you can forgo your own will. That is, the condition, Sir, of your being free is to share the only will that is free in the world, the creative will of the power that created the whole universe, and re-establishes, therefore, your own place in this universe, every day again against your own will; because what you have to become Sir, that's not up to you, what you're meant to be. You will be told this one day and every day.

If anybody would get what he wants, he would be the most -- unhappiest creature. Look at all the rich people who have all they want at 45, and then they blow out their brain, because their whole life has only consisted in getting their will's desire, which is the most miserable, calamitous situation any man can have.

You remember the description in Wolfe's last book, of the writer whom he meets in Europe, who has everything he wants -- women, and success, and money, and -- but he has nothing. Just fluttering. He's not guided anymore, because he's not a member. And he's not taught anymore, because he's not inspired, you see. And he's not a person anymore because he hasn't to represent the order of the universe in his own time.

So the answer is, Sir, that everything, what I have said so far is of course very primitive, but will it { } -- children know this. Only learned people in this college don't know it, you see. The stupidity of the academic clan is just out of proportion to what everybody knows, what every woman knows. Every other person knows all these things, but we have arranged here these -- blinders around you. So you really believe these are deep problems. The depth of the problem is of course only reached when we begin to ask: when are we free and when are we slaves, you see. The "when" is all-important. The two things are given. That's the famous story of the Fall of Man, but you know, the 19th century has a wonderful way of poking fun at original sin and saying, "That's just funny," because you -- of course you are always free, you say. The next moment you listen to a scientist and say, "He has proven that nothing is free. That we are just nature." Didn't we have this paper on "just nature"? You remember, William James, you see, saying, "It's just nature." But if we are just nature then obviously there is no -- no -- no -- no corner of our being where there is any inkling of our freedom. Nature has no freedom.

In Holland, the problems of Jonathan Edwards filled the whole first half of the 18th century. It's perhaps quite as well to know a little about the great Arminian quarrel in Holland, by which the Church itself, under the influence of the rich merchants and the secular well-being of the country -- the high standard of living in Holland was famous at that time; it was the richest country in Europe -- were, of course, inclined to give to business first seat. And that is to say that the will of man was good and free, personal will, the -- self -- the will for self-aggrandizement, for getting rich quick, et cetera, et cetera. So the Arminians, and their opposites fought in the Church of Holland. And there was the famous Dordrecht Synod in 19- -- 1714, which had to decide inside the Church on this Pelagian heresy, whether by human will we could become members of God's kingdom, as I try to phrase it, to make you familiar with this great, very important problem of membership in a community, which cannot depend on your or my will, because we have to be recognized members of the community. There is a give-and-take in this which you cannot force. You can lead a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink. And you can ask people to be balloted into a fraternity, but you can't force them to do that. For this you have to be loved and liked. There's just no other way.

Jonathan Edwards then is in this tradition of a theological controversy. And that's why the Europeans were very much interested, because inside Calvinism, there was taken this first step toward so-called "deism," in which God was deposed from the actual lover of today and creator of tomorrow into a pensioned-off official who had once been the prime mover -- that's the theory of deism, you see -- but had -- could now be dismissed in favor of these rich individuals who planted their tulip bulbs in Holland. These -- they were called in Europe "pepper bags," which people -- selling and buying spices in Arabia, the pepper and the cinnamon, et cetera. Now, the rich will always be in favor of the freedom of the will. Their capital looks to them as an inducement to build on this, you see, by their own purpose -- their own purposes, and their own intent. Poor people are much less tempted to be heretics.

Deism then is the enemy of Edwards, because deism has to take the whole will of God out of the divine cosmos and put it into your and my brain, and say, "You and me are able, by clever computation, to set our own goals, and to fulfill them, and to find the means not only, but to determine our own ends in life." In this sense, then, the attitude of Jonathan about freedom of the will is in anticipation to Voltaire and to all the deists outside the Church.

[Tape interruption]

...so it is the ministry itself, which contains this second branch, you see, the future scientists, the future rationalists, the future physicists, the future

philosophers, { }. And Jonathan Edwards in this sense is not an American figure at all. It is right that he was respected in Edinburgh or in Holland, because his position was that of the man who sees the ministry to become at one side the ministry inside a church, and on the other side the cradle of all the future professors of colleges. They are all runaway sons of ministers, as you know. They are all secularized ministers today. If you count the heads in this college, you will be surprised.

Now Jonathan Edwards feels this. In 1738 there was preached in New -- in Pennsylvania -- or no, in New Jersey it was -- in New Jersey the famous sermon on the dangers of an unconverted ministry. That is contemporary to Jonathan Edwards; it was preached by a very great man, Gilbert Tennent. Gilbert Tennent. And it may show you the problem of fathers and sons, once more when I end up today with giving you the parallel to Jonathan Edwards' position inside this split of the ministry, or -- of the split of the ministry which there was prepared, that after 1750, the Benjamin Franklins and the secular college professors would just be half of the offspring of the ministers of the first 150 years in this country, that they would go one in the ministry and the other, into science or into the professions of some such secular type, and become all deists, and Voltairians, and Free Masons, as they are today in this country. Gilbert Tennent had a father -- very much like Henry James he must have been -- William Tennent, who came to this country from North Ireland in 1716. We know very little about this strange man. We only know one great act of faith on his part. He established a log cabin in Pennsylvania somewhere and educated his own six boys and eigh- -- six sons and eight other friends of his sons, and this group, brought up in the famous "log cabin college" of William Tennent, Sr., was the cradle of the great revival in New Jersey and New York. And here was a father who gave his sons once more the strength, obviously, because he had crossed the ocean and was still one of the, you see, of the old type, the old generation, to preach this great sermon, to break away from the synod of New Jersey and go over to New York, and then be received back into the synod of New Jersey some time later. He was a great schismer of the times, the breaking away from one -- the faithful from the unfaithful. And this sermon, of 1738, I -- recommend to you as an illustration of Jonathan Edwards' two-fold confrontation of his contemporaries. It was preached on the dangers of an uncon- -- -converted ministry. These people saw the danger not in the faithless people of the laity, you see, but in the fact that inside the ministry, you had these philosophizing humanists, these people -- who talked to me about it? You -- you see, these popists, that is the people in line with Mr. Pope of -- of their days; the Arminians, the people who believed that man could be free and love God at the same time. That is, in other words, they changed the -- prayer of "Our Father" and said at the same time, "Let my will be done, and occasionally yours."

Thank you.

[Tape interruption. The following is a transcription of a discussion after class.]

...there's a three-fold translation: a Protestant, a Greek Orthodox, and a Roman Catholic translation. And the Protestant says, "Peace on earth," and how does it go on?

(It's -- the last words, it says, are...)

Ja. Ja.

(Peace on earth, to -- good will to men -- no. Peace to -- on earth to men of good will.)

Well, that's the Roman, and that's in the King James Version. It Luther has translated very strangely enough, "and a pleasure to man," or "a comfort to man." The Greek Orthodox have the true, Jonathan Edwards translation, and "Peace to all men of His pleasure, of His grace," because that is something that will cannot -- you see, do by itself. To have a good will, you see, is not of your own doing, is the point, because it means to try not to have your own will. To keep your will so fluid, so liquid, you see, that it can always bow to necessity and say, "Well, it doesn't matter. I planned this so, but I'm not disappointed."

So, I wish you then peace on earth in all three denominational forms.