Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning Don Schweitzer Avihu Zakai . Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. New York: T & T Clark International, 2010. Pp. ix + 331. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-0-567-22650-1. This enlightening study by Avihu Zakai locates Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of nature and his metaphysical world view within the historical context of intellectual movements occurring in North Atlantic societies from the second half of the 1600s to the end of the 1700s. Zakai illustrates how the rise of modern scientific thought in the work of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton produced a mechanistic understanding of nature that undermined many traditional Christian beliefs and helped dethrone theology as the queen of the sciences. He then examines resistance to the world view that their work and the thought of philosophers like Descartes helped create, with chapters on John Donne, Blaise Pascal, and reactions to Newton’s mechanistic view of nature. Edwards’s thought is then expounded in the final two chapters in relation to this new view of nature and the reaction against it. Zakai shows that this mechanistic world view was perceived by Donne, Pascal, Blake, Swift, and others to have a dehumanizing side, even though advocates and practitioners of the new experimental sciences sought to benefit humanity by increasing human sovereignty over nature through scientific knowledge (98). Nature, interpreted in light of the findings of the natural sciences, became a new source of knowledge, the Book of Nature that clashed with and was to be preferred to knowledge obtained from religious traditions and the Bible. In sum, the natural sciences produced a new view of knowledge (95–96) that helped de-legitimize Scripture and Christian traditions as sources of knowledge. Zakai then describes how the colonial New England Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) responded to this movement. Like the physico-theologians who attempted to prove God’s existence from the order and harmony of nature, Edwards sought to prove that nature demonstrated the existence and nature of God and manifested God’s wisdom (47). For Edwards, creation was finally intelligible only in light of God and God’s purposes. Against the mechanized views of the natural world, arrived at by natural scientists and deist notions of God accompanying them, Edwards formulated a sophisticated understanding of nature as ontologically dependent upon God and created for the purpose of expressing and communicating God’s attributes to humanity (257). Edwards employed classical and medieval notions like the great chain of being to this [End Page 145] effect, in many respects remaining pre-modern in some of his concepts. But Edwards’s relationship to Western modernity was always dialectical. While he opposed deism and what might be described as secularizing trends in Western thought, he greeted advances in the natural sciences and humanities as part of the advance of God’s providential work and modified notions like the great chain of being in light of findings of the natural sciences (263). In relation to the culture of the English Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Edwards’s arguments represented “the expiring power of Calvinism” (229). But in the American colonies his thought helped created “a well-defined American Protestant culture” (229). Zakai situates Edwards in a very illuminating way within the intellectual struggle between traditional Reformed theology and the New Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Perry Miller famously stressed Edwards’s modernity and how far he was ahead of his time. Zakai shows that while Edwards was a creative thinker, he was also very much a person of his time, striving to retain Calvinist affirmations of God’s direct activity in history in the face of the disenchantment with the world in early Western modernity. He shows that what Miller championed as Edwards’s modernity resulted in part from Edwards’s resistance to the disenchantment of the world that Western modernity effected. As Edwards resisted this movement, he incorporated many insights of early modern philosophy and natural science into his theology, producing “a serious and systematic alternative to Enlightenment modes of...