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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2013 2. Short Essay
2a.
Highlight and analyze a passage from our course
readings—your best textual experience
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James Simpson
Jonathan Edwards and the Ecstasy of Horror
Like so many others, Jonathan Edwards and his
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
made an impression on me that I never forgot.
It was nineteen years ago in a literature course
that I was introduced—for the first and, I thought, last time—to this sermon.
The experiences afforded to me in that reach of
time since have somewhat mellowed my reactions, and certainly my opinions,
toward this work, and I can now read it with a somewhat more impartial eye.
That is not to say that my respect for it was ever
lacking; I simply now respect if for other reasons..
Nineteen years ago was an, alas, more innocent
period in my own spiritual journey.
At the time, I believed in eternal conscious
torment, so my reactions to the sermon were, I wager, not unlike those held by
his congregants when first he read the treatise aloud—albeit without groaning
and protestations quite so fervent (my ardor was a brighter candle in 1994,
although not, I confess, so ardent as that burning in Massachusetts in 1741.)
My present reactions to the work, do, I admit, somewhat
disappointment me.
I wish to feel more of that innocent and purifying
will to self-examination; that bracing cleansing of the soul as before; whereas,
today, I read it with more admiration for the skill of his pen, than for the
force of his theological arguments.
In fact, my reaction to the work now is almost
entirely amusement—not at his arguments in regards to the seriousness of sin (of
which I still agree)—but instead at the ecstasy of feeling that he rises
(mounts?) to in describing the wages of sin.
While I heartily loathe the modern tendency to
interpret every ancient sentiment that we no longer understand nor feel only in
the language of fetish, repression, and resentment that is our debased common
coin—yet even so, I cannot help but wonder that the baser impulses of mortal
flesh are yet lurking in the intentions of this just and pious man.
In a word, human nature will find its expression,
just as water will find its level; if sexual ecstasy was forbidden in that time
and place, then, happily, the ecstasy that fallen man finds in blood and pain
was not; the old dark gods of human nature will out.
Edwards
is of course imminently quotable; the essayist finds rather more worth quoting
than the readers’ patience will allow; there is however a longish quote that
does, I think, show the…climax…of his bliss.
I am an old veteran of Pentecostal churches, and
although, sadly, I haven’t witnessed any snake handlings, I have seen my share
of people feigning to swoon in spiritual rapture, running laps around the church
mid-congregation, barking and laughing aloud during the sermon, and doing other
such things that are rather more uncommon in my present Anglican confession.
While these services were of course examples of a
host of lamentable phenomena (such as our susceptibility to the powers of
suggestion, and the strange hive-like behaviors when crowd hysteria takes root),
they also served a cathartic purpose—that was mostly good—in giving a bit of
peace and emotional release to a group of people who are generally world-weary
from the debts and mischances of life that harass the forgotten blue-collar
working poor amongst us.
In these sorts of expressive religious ceremonies
(not unlike the tribal dancing in pre-modern cultures), there is a certain
emotional release; a certain catharsis being exercised; in the following
passages I find this impulse being enacted—albeit in the language of sublime and
gothic horror:
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready
on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow,
and it nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without
any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being
made drunk with your blood [25]….
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much
as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and
is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire. [26]
There is a building crescendo of ecstasy here that
orgiastic…orgasmic.
If sensuality was forbidden or, (sigh) repressed,
then the pent emotions of the human heart found their expression in a language
that was permissible: that of visceral horror at the condition of the human soul
and the just deserts awaiting the sinner falling into divine judgment.
The imagery and language that Edwards employs is
profoundly romantic; it is imaginative prose of a high skill and execution; it
is, in fact, good literature in the spirit of Dante’s Inferno.
Whatever our personal views of Edward’s theology,
we can at least admire him as a spiritual ancestor of our modern horror genre.
