2.2 The Doctrine of the Human Soul

2.2.1 Preliminary Remarks

Jonathan Edwards, of course, did not deal with the nature of the human soul de novo or in a vacuum, but stood within a particular tradition (albeit with the additional help of more contemporary philosophical influences) regarding the make-up of the various powers of human nature. Perry Miller discussed the context of the discussion about the nature of the human soul in his The New England Mind,¹ but more recently Norman Fiering has dealt with the same issue at length in two major studies,² where he cogently demonstrates that Edwards, while a brilliant thinker, was no lone genius in a barren wilderness. Nor was Edwards simply a straightforward disciple of John Locke. Edwards was conversant in the major Continental philosophical discussions of his day (which, of course included such men as Locke and Newton).

The nursery of Jonathan Edwards’s major philosophical ideas was not in the intellectual environment created by Locke and Newton alone…Edwards’s thought was rooted in the great watershed period in British and Continental thought that extended from around 1675, when Nicolas Malebranche’s Search after Truth was first published in French (two separate English translations followed by 1694), to 1711, when the third earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics appeared in fall. This period of about thirty-five years, which includes Locke and Newton but was not dominated by them, was one of great fertility and interchange of ideas. England, France, and Holland composed a remarkably well-integrated republic of letters, and New England shared many common borders with these countries in the realm of thought. The extent of the correspondence and the personal relationships among men of ideas at this time must seem astonishing if one has made the mistake of allowing national frontiers to confine one’s thinking. Within this period, it seems that nearly all of the major intellectual figures were in some sort of contact. One can step into this circle of philosophers almost anywhere and be led around its entirety.Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 14-15. Fiering goes on tell us that while Edwards was a creative thinker, he learned from his philosophical predecessors as well, “Given the paucity of detailed information on Edwards’s early intellectual development, it may be impossible ever to discover exactly which of his ideas came from where and exactly when he first articulated or encountered an idea. But if we think in terms of a milieu, rather than individual influences, and begin to appreciate its unities, it becomes less urgent to know the specifics. It is clear that
Edwards was an independent and highly creative thinker, it is also indisputable that at an early age, directly or indirectly, he learned much from his older contemporaries overseas,” 21.

2.2.2 Thomistic-intellectualist School

Norman Fiering has been extremely helpful in delineating three major schools or camps that developed during the Middle Ages on the question of the nature of the human soul.³ The first of these was the Thomistic-intellectualist school dating to Thomas Aquinas, which held that the will was blind and followed the last dictate or judgment of the “practical intellect”.⁴ That is, the intellect or judgment shows the will what is to be accepted or rejected. The will as “blind” depends upon the understanding to show it what is the “good” to which it ought to aspire. As such, the will can never be guilty of moral error or corruption.⁴ But how can the understanding choose the wrong “good”? Fiering tells us “The will itself is never culpable in the case of moral error, since it only follows the judgment of the intellect. The will as the rational appetite is supposed to govern the lower sensitive appetites, although it may happen that unruly vehement appetites from below will obscure rational judgment and thus influence choice wrongly.”⁴ Accordingly, without information from the understanding, “the will is not the will, but a confused appetite.”⁵ In the Thomist-intellectualist school of thought, a person is said to be free as long as his mind is internally persuaded as opposed to control by “external constraint” or “inner compulsions” (presumably the “uprising” of the lower or sensitive appetites).⁵ To sum up the Thomistic- intellectualist tradition, we can say that with regard to the relationship of the intellect to the will in the human soul, that there is a primacy of the intellect since the will is itself blind. The will, then, must be directed by the understanding.

2.2.3 Scholastic-Voluntarist School

While, as Fiering reminds us, the Thomist-intellectualist school was the majority report amongst both Protestants and Catholics, another school arose during the Middle Ages which could be traced back to Duns Scotus, which he labels the Scholastic-voluntarist school.⁶ Fiering tells us,

The Scholastic-voluntarists maintained that human beings retain a freedom of the will beyond even the freedom of unconstrained intellectual judgment and action. It was questionable, according to this group, that human freedom could be distinguished from the freedom (or lack of it) of animals if one went along with the intellectualists. For the choices of animals, too, when they are not subject to external constraints, are governed by internal necessities only, rather than mechanical causation. Man’s freedom, then, must consist in a liberty to will in opposition to any preceding influences from the soul. Any internal necessities, including those of reason, may be considered restrictions on freedom nearly as much as external compulsions.⁶

The Scholastic-voluntarists held to a self-determining will, not even influenced by the understanding. We might say that in comparison with the Thomist-intellectualist position, the Scholastic-voluntarist school advocated a primacy of the will. Freedom for this group would seem to preclude all influences including the understanding and other elements of the human personality.

2.2.4 Augustinian-voluntarist School

The third group in the discussion on the relationship of the understanding to the will within the human soul Fiering calls the Augustinian-voluntarist school, traceable back beyond the Middle Ages to the great Augustine of Hippo. For this school of thought, the will involved the tendency, trajectory or “orientation” of the whole human personality and not just the “mental faculty”⁷ in abstraction. As Fiering points out, the Augustinian-voluntarists were,

explicitly determinist with respect to the doctrine of predestination and God’s direct influence on human destinies, but antideterminist, in a sense, with respect to the intellectualist thesis that the will follows the last dictate of the understanding. In other words, the Augustinians denied the dependence of will on understanding-the will is free in its relations with the other faculties of the higher soul-but insisted instead on the will’s utter submissiveness to innate or infused propensities, such as the habitude of concupiscence or the influence of divine grace.⁸

The Augustinian-voluntarists were voluntaristic in the sense that the will does not necessarily follow the last dictate of the understanding⁹ although, unlike the Scholastic-voluntarists, they did not hold that the will had to be uninfluenced by the other aspects of the human personality (say, the affections) in order to be free. The will is oriented either to God or to self.⁸ Unlike the other schools, the Augustinians found freedom in worship and service to God and not in some kind of autonomous action on the part of the will or the understanding.¹⁰ Here we find a primacy of orientation, in the case of the regenerate it is a primacy of grace whereas for the unregenerate it is a case of the primacy of concupiscence.

2.2.5 The Influence of John Locke

Edwards would properly be seen as an Augustinian-voluntarist with his emphasis on the heart found throughout his writings. But he also learned from and interacted with more contemporaneous philosophers such as John Locke. While Edwards was certainly no slavish disciple of Locke, he very clearly did interact with his thought.¹¹ One area where Edwards probably reflects the influence of Locke is his rejection or reformulation of the traditional tripartite faculty psychology as reflecting the notion that the intellect, will and emotions are separate agents within the human soul,

These powers of the mind, viz. of perceiving, and of preferring, are usually called by another name. And the ordinary way of speaking is, that the understanding and will are two faculties of the mind; a word proper enough, if it be used, as all words should be, so as not to breed any confusion in men’s thoughts, by being supposed (as I suspect it has been) to stand for some real beings in the soul that performed those actions of understanding and volition. For when we say the will is the commanding and superior faculty of the soul; that it is or is not free, that it determines the inferior faculties; that it follows the dictates of the understanding, &c.,-though these and the like expressions, by those that carefully attend to their own ideas, and conduct their thoughts more by the evidence of things than the sound of words, may be understood in a clear and distinct sense -yet I suspect, I say, that this way of speaking of faculties has misled man into a confused notion of so many agents in us, which had their own several provinces and authorities, and did command, obey, and perform several actions, are so many distinct beings; which has been no small occasion of wrangling, obscurity, and uncertainty, in questions relating to them.¹²

Jonathan Edwards, then, we can tentatively say, stood within the Augustinian-voluntarist school concerning the nature of the human soul, especially regarding the relation of the understanding and will. To a certain extent, at least, he followed Locke in his rejection of faculty psychology. These facts set well within Edwards’s use of the Augustinian psychological model of the Trinity and with his concomitant notion of man as an analogue of this Triune God.

1. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954).↩
2. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) and its companion volume Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).↩
3. According to Norman Fiering, “Edwards inherited from seventeenth-century Protestant Scholasticism a number of his ideas about will-many more certainly than he got from reading John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding-and it will be useful, first, to sketch this legacy. The diverse schools of thought at Harvard in the seventeenth century, where one finds reflected most of the major divisions in the wider republic of letters, may be reduced to three primary groups: Thomist-intellectualist; Scholastic-voluntarist; and Augustinian-voluntarist,” Edwards’s Moral Thought, 263-264. We might not quite agree with Fiering’s assessment of faculty psychology though,” In most if not all cases, contrary to what is sometimes asserted, the sophisticated defenders of these positions had a unified view of the human psyche and human functioning and did not fall into the kind of naive hypostatization of the faculties that Locke and others later attacked. A ‘faculty’ of the mind was understood to be a power or capacity, and the study of the will meant the study of the act of willing, election, or choice.” It appears to us that Fiering is begging the question here in that if he is correct, the whole discussion, including Edwards’s reformulation, would be much ado about nothing.↩
4. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 264.↩
5. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 265.↩
6. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 267.↩
7. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 268.↩
8. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 269.↩
9. Unless, with Allyn Lee Ricketts, we affirm that Augustinians, including Edwards, included within the ambit of the “understanding” more than just the reason. See Rickett’s “The Primacy of Revelation in the Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards” (Ph.D. diss: Westminster Theological Seminary, 1995).↩
10. Fiering notes, “Yet this group of voluntarists also often asserted that human beings have the capacity to achieve a unique degree of freedom. This was not, however, the freedom of the intellectualists, which came simply from taking thought or exercising reason, or the freedom of the Suarezians, which required a self-determining will, but the freedom that results from obedience to divine law and unity with the will of God. It is the freedom described by Luther in his famous address on Christian liberty, the freedom from servitude to sin and material lusts. The Augustinian-voluntarists’ concern was not with the kind of liberty that some considered to be an essential precondition of virtuous action, but with the liberty that resulted from virtue. They gloried in the bondage of the will to divine grace and claimed that this bondage paradoxically conferred the only liberty worth having,” Edwards’s Moral Thought, 269-270.↩
11. For instance, Conrad Cherry tells us that, “In ‘The Mind,’ in large part a penning of his reflections on his reading of Locke, Edwards explicitly rejected Locke’s definition of identity and Locke’s position that ‘uneasiness’ determines the will. Nevertheless, although Edwards was not totally persuaded by every feature of Locke’s philosophy, he did find that the insights into the nature of the mental act in Locke’s Essay provided an appropriate way of conceiving the character of ‘faithful knowledge.’ Above all, Locke’s treatment of the human faculties and his theory of the ’simple idea’ became useful for Edwards in a description of the internal dynamics of the act of faith,” The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15.↩
12. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Encyclopedia Britannica, 1991), II.XXI. 5 & 6.↩